To ensure that joint technical development with large firms goes smoothly, small businesses need to have specific abilities. In this paper, those special abilities are referred to as “cooperative capabilities”. Cooperative capabilities should be needed by small businesses when they start to cooperate with large firms for joint technical development. The goal of this research is to clarify the factors which constitute small businesses' “cooperative capabilities”.

In Osaka, Japan, there is a technical business matching meeting in order to promote joint technical development between large firms and small businesses in environmental and energy projects. We chose this forum as a case to analyse in our research. We divided forum member firms into two groups. One group is composed of small businesses which were able to have technical meetings(TM) with large firms. We call this group the “TM group”. The other group is composed of small businesses which did not have technical meetings with large firms. We call this group “No-TM group”. Small businesses which succeeded in having a first TM with large firms were identified as firms with high potential for continuous technical cooperation with large firms. By identifying the differences between the twogroups, we can recognize the factors contributing to “cooperative capabilities" which exist only in TM group. For the purpose of this study, we distributed questionnaire to them and also conducted interviews. Finally, we concluded that core elements of cooperative capabilities in small businesses are outstanding technologies which do not exist in large firms and specific ability to make value-added proposal to large firms to solve not only present but also potential problems.

It has been expected that university spin-offs are to become an effective mechanism for commercializing potential but often underexploited or unexploited resources that are stocked in academic organizations. However, the reality seems to be more complicated than expectations. For example, in Japan the failure rate of university spin-offs turned out to be six times as much as the birth rate in 2008. We thus comes to a question of how to have university spin-offs developing, other than just how to have them created. This paper will explore this question by analyzing the university spin-offs in Japan from the perspectives of “dynamic entrepreneurial capability”. It is organized as follows. Section 1 is the research question of how university spin-offs can evolve from the initial fluid stage. Section 2 reviews the theoretical perspectives of resourcebased view and dynamic capability, while section 3 proposes our theoretical argument of “dynamic entrepreneurial capability”, which is disaggregated into resources mobility ability, innovative ability, and integrated ability. Subsequently, in order to examine this argument, section 4 conducts two case studies, a market-pull case and a technologypush one. Section 5 and Section 6 are devoted to a discussion and conclusion. By studying Japan’s university spin-offs, this paper emphasizes the roles that dynamic entrepreneurial capability plays in facilitating the survival and growth of university spin-offs. Moreover, our conceptual framework sheds lights on academic research in the field of academic entrepreneurship, and also offers some potential impact on the research on dynamic capability.