Academic spin-offs (ASOs) originate from universities that are in turn embedded in regional ecosystems. As such, ASOs are embedded in interdependent contexts with their own resources and logics. While past research has usually focused on factors related to ASO performance at one contextual level, systems theory suggests the need to account for multiple contextual levels. We rely on multi-level modeling and use longitudinal data on 3,164 ASOs from 212 research-active universities in 99 different regions in 10 European countries. We find that the region effect accounts for significant variance in ASO performance, however, surprisingly, the university effect is negligible. Our study contributes to research at the nexus of academic entrepreneurship and variance decomposition in strategy.
