NOTES
2.5 CONCLUSIONS
a scientist on the basis of a licence or patent from a public sector institu- tion to a venture-backed firm that will be able to float on a stock market, and the lack of autonomy of the actors to adapt to the specific context of individual spin-offs, many of which are likely to remain small.
the ownership of IP, the creation of the possibility and the capabilities for academic to create a company, support for a project or firm, and the devel- opment of TTOs, incubators and seed capital funds in or around univer- sities and public research institutions.
Although there is debate about the end of national-level initiatives and the growth of regional and European initiatives, in the two cases decribed here, the national level was the engine of policy to encourage spin-offs. In these two countries, the ministry or the department in charge of research launched the programmes: the OST in the UK, and the Ministry of Research in France. This is also the case in Germany, that is, a country where the Länder play an important political role (Audretsch and Beckman, 2005).
One important policy concerns the complementary between the diverse initiatives taken to promote spin-offs. The SQW (2005) evaluation report shows that in July 2003, less than 50 per cent of the funded HEIs in the UK received funding from more than one programme. On the other hand, 51 HEIs received only HEIF funding, seven only SEC funding and three only UCF funding. However, SQW (2005) note that the additional activ- ity of all programmes is high in terms of the recruitment of extra staff, which the institutions would not have funded on a similar scale from their own budgets, and the generation of additional commercialization of research ideas and company formation. In the French case, there appears to be a degree of complementary, with 32 per cent of the creators being involved in more than one of the four incentives measures. The most important overlap is observed between the competition and the incuba- tors. Of all the companies resulting from the competition and the incuba- tors, 23 per cent of companies are common to both measures; the 315 companies concerned accounting respectively for 47 per cent of the com- panies created from the incubators and for 45 per cent of the companies resulting from the competition.
However, our analysis of the available data and our discussion with the people in charge of the incubators and the public seed capital funds show that there is a large gap between these two instruments. The government intervention model in its present form functions only partially. The linear model adopted by the government is limited, as only a very small percent- age of the start-ups financed by seed capital funds are from public-sector incubators. Although the French government perceived there to be com- plementarity in its measures concerning incubators and start-up funds, this complementarity did not materialize since only eight of the 344 firms created from incubators by the end of 2001 had benefited from seed capital funds. Indeed, 77 per cent of the firms supported by the seed capital funds (that is, 27 out of 35) were not created from incubators. Conversely, only 2
per cent of the firms created in incubators (8 out of 344) benefited from seed capital. At the end of 2005, the 11 public seed money funds resulting from the call for projects in 1999 (five national funds and six regional funds) had invested in 106 companies. Among these 45 companies, 43 per cent came from the incubators. There is thus a complementarity between the funds and the incubators. However, these companies accounted for only 6 per cent of the total of 844 companies generated by the incubators at the end of 2005 (Ministère délégué à la recherche, 2006). As far too few pro- jects are financed by seed capital, this cuts across the main premise of French policy towards spin-offs.
While UK initiatives are characterized by the fact that they bring money to the higher education institutions, French initiatives do not. The UK has placed the universities at the heart of policies aimed at the creation of spin- offs; this may be less the case in France.
NOTES
1. Via specialized funds CDC Entreprises invests directly in new ventures, whatever their branch of industry or their stage of development. CDC Entreprises intervenes also indi- rectly in the financing of the capital companies while subscribing to investment funds or by taking participations in VC companies. The total amount of funds managed within CDC Entreprises is 4.2 billion euros. One of its missions is the promotion of the VC funds for technological companies.
2. The following information is from Segal, Quince and Wicksteed (SQW) Limited’s (February 2005) interim evaluation of knowledge transfer programmes funded by the office of science and technology through the science budget (http://www.ost.gov.uk/
enterprise/knowledge/unichal.htm).
3. In France, academics in universities are civil servants and researchers in public research institutions are generally civil servants or have a similar status.
4. In national seed money funds, three types of subscriber can be distinguished: private sub- scribers (30–50 per cent of the funds), CDC-Enterprises (20–30 per cent), and public research organizations (15–30 per cent). The Regional Councils and universities are also subscribers to regional funds.