学会誌

　It has been expected that university spin-offs are to become an effective mechanism for commercializing potential but often underexploited or unexploited resources that are stocked in academic organizations. However, the reality seems to be more complicated than expectations. For example, in Japan the failure rate of university spin-offs turned out to be six times as much as the birth rate in 2008.We thus comes to a question of how to have university spin-offs developing, other than just how to have them created.
　This paper will explore this question by analyzing the university spin-offs in Japan from the perspectives of “dynamic entrepreneurial capability”. It is organized as follows. Section 1 is the research question of how university spin-offs can evolve from the initial fluid stage. Section 2 reviews the theoretical perspectives of resourcebased view and dynamic capability, while section 3 proposes our theoretical argument of “dynamic entrepreneurial capability”, which is disaggregated into resources mobility ability, innovative ability, and integrated ability. Subsequently, in order to examine this argument, section 4 conducts two case studies, a market-pull case and a technologypush one. Section 5 and Section 6 are devoted to a discussion and conclusion.
　By studying Japan’s university spin-offs, this paper emphasizes the roles that dynamic entrepreneurial capability plays in facilitating the survival and growth of university spin-offs. Moreover, our conceptual framework sheds lights on academic research in the field of academic entrepreneurship, and also offers some potential impact on the research on dynamic capability.