Research Areas

Venture Capital and Business Angel Financing
The EFI research group conducts research aiming at investigating venture capital and business angel financing and their effects on the performance of start-ups, with special attention to Europe. It applies advanced data analytics, semantic analysis tools, and panel data econometric techniques to large-scale longitudinal firm level datasets, like the RISIS-VICO 4.0 dataset on European VC-backed start-ups. The research has obtained funding from the European Commission through the FP7 VICO and RISIS1 project, and the Horizon2020 RISIS2 project. The research aims …

Crowdfunding
The research aims at investigating crowdfunding (CF), with special attention to the determinants of the success of CF campaigns and the links with other sources of entrepreneurial finance. The research takes advantage of comprehensive longitudinal campaign-level data infrastructure on reward-based and equity CF, and the use of advanced machine learning and semantic content analysis techniques for campaign classification. The results of this research has been published in top scientific journals, including Science, and has great impact on the international scientific …

Drivers of growth and internationalization of start-ups and SMEs
The research aims at investigating the drivers of growth and internalization of firms in Europe, with the extensive use of data analytics and semantic analysis tools. A particular focus is on the patterns of growth and innovation of fast growing mid-sized firms and the drivers of internationalization of start-ups and SMEs. The research is mainly developed in the context of two research projects funded by the European Commission: the FP7 RISIS1 and Horizon2020 RISIS2 projects, which resulted in the release …

Knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems
The research aims at identifying the links between the geographical patterns of knowledge creation, and the innovation and economic performances of entrepreneurial ecosystems. For this purpose, we map the knowledge creation characteristics of different entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe across different industries, identify key actors (universities, start-ups, incumbent firms, financial intermediaries), and analyse their behaviour. We also detect potential sources of synergies between these actors, the boundary conditions relating to actors’ specific characteristics under which these synergies materialize, and measure their …

Student entrepreneurship and academic spin-off
The research focuses on the antecedents and economic impact of student entrepreneurship, i.e. new firm creation by university students and recent graduates, and academic entrepreneurship, i.e. new firm creation by university faculty members. In particular, the research studies the extent and evolution of these phenomena, the effects of university characteristics on entrepreneurial entry of students and faculty members, the unique resources and capabilities of students’ ventures and academic start-ups and spinoffs and their effects on innovation and growth performances. Results …

Behavioural entrepreneurship and finance
Entrepreneurs and venture capital investors play a central role in new venture creation, market transformation and economic growth. Therefore, investigation of carefully selected affective, behavioural and cognitive factors can add substantially to our understanding of the basic processes that underlie key activities performed by entrepreneurs (e.g. opportunity creation and exploitation, entrepreneurial learning) and investors (e.g. investment decision-making). This brand new research aims to use real experiments with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business angels, and semantic analysis techniques to identify affective, …