Sustainable university entrepreneurship: Revisiting firm growth patterns

Previous research on the firm growth of the university spin‐offs (USOs) and its drivers yields inconclusive results. Recently, the literature on the high‐growth firms (HGFs) has relied on regression quantile methods to study how the effects of growth determinants may differ along the firm growth distribution. This study builds a bridge between the two strands of literature by exploring how firm‐specific characteristics may shape sales and employment growth patterns of USOs. To this end, it applies panel data quantile regression models in a sample of 531 Spanish USOs over the period of 2001–2013. The results show that the growth drivers not only differ between employment growth and sales growth but also along the growth distributions.