Reviewing the employee spinout literature: A cross-disciplinary approach

Increasing research on spinouts highlights the key role that employees play in new business creation, knowledge diffusion, and economic development. However, this research conflicts on many points, including on definitions of key concepts. In this paper, we review the theoretical and empirical literatures on private sector employee spinouts and integrate insights spanning multiple academic disciplines. We address definitional ambiguity and propose a cross-disciplinary conceptual framework that adequately captures the extant literature on this phenomenon. Doing so allows us to organize the selected academic articles on employee spinouts into six themes: antecedents at the individual, organizational (parent firm), and external environmental levels, and consequences of spinouts for spinout founder(s), parent firms, and external environments. For each theme, we summarize the key research questions, theories, and evidence to date, and refer to potential integration points that could help to expand our knowledge. We conclude our review of each major theme with targeted suggestions for future research.