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The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the relationship between the governance structure of universities and the universities' knowledge transfer (KT) performance outcomes measured in terms of university spin-off firms university spin-offs (USOs).

The universities' board of directors has been analyzed under three profiles: the incidence of internal directors belonging to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) faculties, the incidence of women directors and the incidence of external directors.

The findings provide evidence of a significant and positive association, for southern Italian state universities, of the presence of university STEM directors and the establishment of university spin-offs (USOs).

The article is original as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study, except for the paper by Meoli et al. (2019), examined the governance of universities in relation to the establishment of academic spin-offs.