The influence of scientific prestige and peer effects on the intention to create university spin-offs

Star scientists played a major role in the founding and establishment of the biotech industry. But while numerous biotech spin-offs have been created in the U.S., few have been established in Europe, despite research in biotech and the presence of star scientists. In addition to the prestige of a researcher, we would therefore like to examine the importance of university culture and peer effects for the intention to create a spin-off. Because of the inadequacy of existing prestige indices, we created a new index to measure the prestige of scientists for our analysis. With data from 533 German and Swiss scientists in the life sciences, we will show that, besides other variables, prestige and peer effects influence the intention to create a university spin-off.