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The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. However, when university spinoffs involve an employment transition by a researcher out of the not-for-profit sector, the creation of a university spinoff is likely to impose a higher social cost than the creation of an industry startup. To offset this higher social cost which arise from the lost knowledge accumulation and disclosure in the not-forprofit research sector, university spinoffs must produce a larger stream of social benefits than industry startups, a performance premium

The ability of firms to establish R&D collaborations that combine resources, exploit complementary know-how, and internalize R&D externalities has been shown to be of high importance for the successful creation and implementation of new knowledge. We argue in this article that collaborative R&D may not only be beneficial in terms of appropriability of returns to R&D investment, access to the partner's knowledge base and the exploitation of scale and scope in R&D, but that it may also be a strategy to cope with financing constraints for R&D. Studying panel data we show that collaboration with science alleviates liquidity constraints for research. Horizontal collaboration reduces liquidity constraints for both research as well as R and D. Vertical collaboration has no such effects.

Applying a variant of a non-parametric matching estimator, we consider European funding and national funding as heterogeneous treatments, distinguishing and simultaneously analyzing the effect these treatments have on innovation input and performance. In terms of input, getting funding from both sources yields the highest impact. If funding from only one source is received, EU grants have higher effects. In terms of output, holding innovation expenditures constant, funding from both sources display higher sales of market novelties and future patent applications at the firm level. If only one grant is obtained, we find superiority for national funding.

While often presumed in academic literature and policy discussions there is little empirical evidence showing that academic patents protect more basic inventions than corporate patents. This study provides new evidence on the basicness of academic patents using German professor patents linked to patent opposition data from the European Patent Office (EPO). Patent oppositions are the most important mechanism by which the validity of patents filed at the EPO can be challenged. Controlling for patent value, asymmetric information and diverging expectations between the opposition parties, the likelihood of a potentially litigious situation and the relative costs of opposition versus settlement, we find that academic patents are opposed less frequently than a control group of corporate patents. This suggests that academic patents cover rather basic inventions with a low immediate commercial value not threatening current returns of potential plaintiffs. The effect is weaker for academic patents in collaboration with the business sector, which suggests that those patents are evaluated as more applied by owners of potentially rival technologies.

Previous literature provided evidence on financing constraints for investment in R&D activities due to capital market imperfections and special features of R&D investments. Moreover, it has been shown that a shift in capital structure towards more debt, results in a reduction of R&D investments. This article complements this literature by compartmentalizing R&D activities in its components, ""R"" and ""D"". In particular, we distinguish research from development as these activities do not only differ in their nature, but also to a large extent take place sequentially. Our results show that ""R"" investment is more sensitive to the firms' operating liquidity than ""D"" indicating that firms have to rely even more on internal funds for financing their research compared to development activities. Moreover, we find that (basic) research subsidy recipients' investment is less sensitive to internal liquidity.