Biomedical Academic Entrepreneurship Through the SBIR Program

Andrew A. Toole, Dirk Czarnitzki

NBER Working Paper No. 11450
Issued in July 2005
NBER Program(s):Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

This paper considers the U.S. Small Business Innovation research (SBIR) program as a policy fostering academic entrepreneurship. We highlight two main characteristics of the program that make it attractive as an entrepreneurship policy: early-stage financing and scientist involvement in commercialization. Using unique data on NIH supported biomedical researchers, we trace the incidence of biomedical entrepreneurship through SBIR and describe some of the characteristics of these individuals. To explore the importance of early-stage financing and scientist involvement, we complement our individual level data with information on scientist-linked and non-linked SBIR firms. Our results show that the SBIR program is being used as a commercialization channel by academic scientists. Moreover, we find that the firms associated with these scientists perform significantly better than other non-linked SBIR firms in terms of follow-on venture capital funding, SBIR program completion, and patenting.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w11450

Published:

• Toole, Andrew A. and Dirk Czarnitzki. "Biomedical academic entrepreneurship through the SBIR program." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 63, 4 (August 2007): 716-738 . citation courtesy of
• Biomedical Academic Entrepreneurship through the SBIR Program, Andrew Toole, Dirk Czarnitzki. in Academic Science and Entrepreneurship: Dual Engines of Growth, Jaffe, Lerner, Stern, and Thursby. 2007

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