Gloria Puliga

The relationship between the development of circular-oriented innovations and their impact on companies' economic performance is still an under researched management issue in the existing studies on circular economy. Through scrutinizing the 100 companies that invested the most in R&D from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2020, this study addresses this research gap. The level of companies' circular-oriented innovations has been measured with the number and percentage of circular patents while the economic performance is proxied with the operating revenues. In addition, since the fact that the impact of circular-oriented innovations on economic performance may be enhanced by companies' collaborations, the moderating role of copatenting, a widely adopted measure of the level of collaboration between companies, has been verified. After a general investigation involving more than 12 million patents, the panel data regression model proves that circular-oriented innovations are related to companies' economic performance, but a negative correlation persists along the different time lags, while the copatenting moderates this relationship.

The interest about Research spin-offs (RSOs) has constantly increased since the last fifteen years on average, as their number is augmenting all over Europe and, consequently, several academic debates about the effective success, convincing strategy, and real performance of this peculiar kind of start-up company are open and arouse tricky questions. In addition, following the Internet revolution and globalization, nowadays we are assisting to the rising of high-growth firms, gazelles, “unicorns” and other kinds of companies that go beyond the traditional (old) vision of doing business. Moreover, open innovation, lean start-up and design thinking are at present some representative emerging strategies for doing business. Notwithstanding, in this fast-changing scenario and despite the growing relevance for companies of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital technologies, the role and the features of RSOs specifically providing digital products/services are still unexplored. In this paper, we leverage on a multiple case study analysis of four Italian digital RSOs to highlight differences and similarities with non-digital RSOs, their peculiarities in terms of drivers that foster their creation (as the role of the universities or the location issues), or, in terms of potential value creation, the successful competitive strategies that digital RSOs pursue.