Systematic review reveals early academic commercialisation depends on multi-level alignment between researchers, technology transfer offices, and clear policies, highlighting key design factors.
Higher education institutions are increasingly judged by their ability to translate research into societal and economic value, and university spin-offs represent a high-visibility route for university-industry knowledge transfer and commercialisation. This systematic review synthesises 34 peer-reviewed studies (2020-2025) on academic entrepreneurship at the interface of spin-offs and formal commercialisation. Across the evidence, early commercialisation depends less on single best practices than on alignment across levels. Individual conditions translate into disclosure, opportunity evaluation, and partnering more reliably when Technology Transfer Office (TTO) brokerage is discipline-sensitive, timely, and networked to investors and industry, and when ownership and revenue-sharing rules and policy portfolios are transparent and stable. Heterogeneous outcomes and units of analysis, however, limit aggregation and causal inference. We propose a multi-level framework of conditional complementarities and derive implications for designing effective university–industry cooperation and for future stage-spanning, multi-level research.
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Pohlmann et al. (2026) studied this question.