Disagreements and Intra-Industry Spinoffs

A growing empirical literature on spinoff formation has begun to reveal some striking regularities about which firms are most likely to spawn spinoffs, when they are most likely to spawn them, and the relationship between the quality of the parent firm and its spinoffs. Deeper investigations into the causes of spinoffs have highlighted the importance of strategic disagreements in driving some employees to resign and found a new venture. Motivated by this literature, we construct a new theory of spinoff formation driven by strategic disagree-ments, and explore how well it explains the emerging empirical regularities.Spinoffs, learning, strategic disagreement

Spinoff Entry in High-tech Industries: Motives and Consequences

Various theories have been advanced for why employees leave incumbent firms to found firms in the same industry, which we call spinoffs. We review the accumulating evidence about spinoffs in various high-tech industries, highlighting the central role often played by disagreements. Because existing theories have ignored them, we develop the foundations of a model of spinoff formation driven by disagreements. Doing so proves to be rather challenging, because disagreements are not possible among rational actors that talk to each other. We introduce a minimal degree of non-rationality, based on the concept of solipsism, and ask whether such a concept is capable of generating predictions consistent with the empirical literature.Spinoffs, Technological change, learning, disagreements

Network Effects and Geographic Concentration of Industry

This paper provides a theory of 'family network,' in contrast to 'local externalities,' to explain the geographic concentration of industry. For many industries, one most important source of entrants is spinoffs, who typically locate near parent firms and benefit from knowledge linkage and business relation within the family network. As a result, firms are more likely to enter and less likely to exit if they are associated with a large family. Using a unique dataset of US automobile industry in its early years, we identify six historically important production centers and sixty spinoff families. Our empirical analysis disentangles the effect of 'family networks' from other 'local externalities,' and provides strong evidence that it was the former rather than the latter that caused the geographic concentration of US automobile production

Entry by Spinoff in a High-tech Cluster

Recently empirical studies have focused on how capabilities of new entering firms are important for the evolution of industries over time. The performance of new entrants appears to be significantly influenced by their pre-entry background. The general impression of the literature is that firms founded by former employees of successful incumbents have shown larger propensities to survive than other categories of new entrants. In the present paper, we use this approach to study the emergence and growth over the past three decades of a wireless telecommunications cluster around Aalborg in North Jutland, Denmark (NorCOM). The aim is to analyse the dominating forces behind the growth of NorCOM using detailed information about the founding events and organizational background of the individual entrants in the cluster. We show that the technological successes of firms in the region have powered a spinoff process, which can account for the majority of the growth in number of firms and employment in the cluster.Clusters, Spinoffs, Evolution of Industries, Entrepreneurs

Heritage and Firm Survival - An Analysis of German Automobile Spinoffs 1886-1939

The theory predicts that spinoffs of successful parents are more successful than others. The success of the parents can be measured in two ways, either in terms of their survival duration or concerning their innovative activity. In this paper, the survival chances of spinoffs in the German automobile industry regarding the success of their parents will be investigated. Therefore it is differentiated between spinoffs of old parents and spinoffs of innovative parents. The results of the Cox regressions show that spinoffs of old parents have better survival chances than those of innovative parents.firm survival

Industrial dynamics and economic geography: a survey

We review the literature on clusters and their effects on industrial dynamics as well on various lifecycle dynamics underlying the process of cluster formation and cluster dynamics. The review shows that there is little evidence that clusters enhance firm growth and survival. In the absence of localization economies, the emergence of clusters is best understood as an evolutionary process of capability transmission between parents firms and their spinoffs. We discuss various future research avenues and call for theorising based on firm heterogeneity as well as empirical research based on common methodological standards.entry, exit, cluster, localization economies, lifecycle, firm heterogeneity

Spinoffs and parents in clusters: evidence from the Italian motorcycle industry

In this paper, we study the relation between parenting events and the performance of firms. Using data from the Italian motorcycle industry (1893–1993), we find that parents have higher survival chances after generating a spinoff (i.e. parenting event), confirming results from previous studies about other manufacturing industries. We also show that the survival patterns of parent firms differ across space, and we link them to cluster characteristics: parenting events are associated to survival advantages in the clusters of Milan and the Motorvalley, and to survival disadvantages in the cluster of Turin. The paper contributes to the literature on spinoffs and employee mobility and adds to the debate on the role of clusters and their institutions in evolutionary economic geography, by highlighting the importance of contextual factors for the performance of parent firms