Overview of the data

The dataset contains a list of 322 spin-offs, ranging from 1973 (!!!) to 2017 (current year). In the next graph can see the number of spin-offs in this list, grouped by year of creation:

Number of spin-offs per year of creation

Fun fact: the list includes Logitech, a EPFL spin-off created in 1981.

What are these companies focused on?

As the EPFL is “poly-technical”, there are different fields of technology that its students are specialized in. This graph shows which kinds of technologies are more likely to become an EPFL spin-off:

spin-offs grouped by industry sector

I know, I know… the technologies that were trending in 1975 might not be the same that the ones that receive more attention nowadays. The next graph shows how it has evolved over the years:

IT has always stayed on the top, probably because they are easier to fund since they usually need less physical infrastructure to kick off. Although recently Medtech has caught up with it: in the last 5 years there were 22 Medtech spin-offs versus 23 IT spin-offs.

Micro-nanotech, which started 2nd after IT, has been steadily decreasing and it is now in the 7th position.

What is the current status of all these companies?

How are those spin-offs doing today? The following graph gives an overview of the current status (as of 2017) of those spin-offs:

Spin-offs grouped by current company status (as of 2017)

Only two of those spin-offs went public: Logitech and Biocartis. Going public refers to a private company’s initial public offering (IPO), thus becoming a publicly traded and owned entity. Businesses usually go public to raise capital in hopes of expanding, and venture capitalists may use IPOs as an exit strategy (a way of getting out of their investment in a company).

On the other hand, the ratio of spin-offs that cashed-in via Mergers & Acquisitions (that were bought by another company) is 9%.

Finally, only ~23.6% of the listed spin-offs went out of business. After confirming that the input data is perfectly valid, this does not seem to be a positive statistic: EPFL Spin-offs seem to rely on the advantages provided by the EPFL (such as low rent and free services) which makes it difficult to know when to pull the plug.

Conclusions

Although we do not know the financial numbers for those spin-offs, the data indicates that “making it big” in an EPFL spin-off has a probability of less than 10% (which is the sum of “public companies” + “mergers & acquisitions”).

For this 91% that do not “make it big”, a lot of them linger a lot instead of pulling the plug and trying something else: from 2012 to 2017, only 1 of the 99 spin-offs listed by the EPFL went out of business.

Regarding the focus of those spin-offs: the industries that are currently trending up are Medtech, Electrical-electronics and Biotech. The pharmacy industry being a big actor in Switzerland has probably something to do with this trend. On the other hand, IT can be considered a “safe-haven”.

Feedback

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