SPIFFI

• Andrea Belz, USC Viterbi
• Alexandra Graddy-Reed, USC Price
• Fernando Zapatero, Boston University

Startup Progress in Formation and Financing after I-Corps (SPIFFI) examines how academic entrepreneurs fare after the I-Corps award. We study the teams’ ability to attract both public and private funds, as well as looking for signals of team migration. We see that:

• Teams are more than twice as likely to be awarded SBIR grants as the typical pool.
• Teams do not tend to migrate systematically from their home regions, even over 5-year periods.