Spin-off във враждебна среда: сътрудничество между наука и бизнес в сектора на информационните технологии в България

In the last three decades, a great emphasis has been put on the creation of economic wealth from public funded research. Traditionally, the interest among policymakers and academics has been in the knowledge transfer through licensing of innovations but greater attention is now being addressed internationally to the creation of research based spin-offs. Based on empirical studies of the post-socialist science and technology development in Bulgaria, the present paper analyzes the diverse patterns of cooperation between science and industry. The analysis describes two examples of spin-off companies that have their roots in one of the leading IT research institutes within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In the first case, the companies made a profit from the vulnerability of the parent institution and took all advantages for the company while all losses remained for the research institute or individual researchers. In the second case, the spin-off company and the institute have built their long-term relations on a mutual trust, both benefiting from the respective experience and resources available in each of them. Using these examples the paper analyzes some specific characteristics of science-industry cooperation patterns in particular institutional and national context: e.g. spin-off as bottom-up instead of – more typical for capitalist economies, top-down policies of science-industry relations and the heterogeneity of the spinoffs, based on the lack of legal and institutional support.