Our work is related to several, often interrelated, strands of existing literature. A first set of related papers looks at the role of tacit knowledge on entrepreneurship and on firms' innovative efforts. The empirical literature in this field shows that the commercialization of innovative technologies (like biotechnology) is strongly affected by the fact that the underlying relevant knowledge is to a large extent tacit (see e.g. Zucker et al., 1998). On theoretical ground, Spulber (2012) highlights how higher quality inventions result in entrepreneurship, due to the fact that tacit knowledge cannot be fully transferred from the inventor to the firm. Franco and Filson (2006) show that employees might be willing to ‘pay’ for the possibility of learning the know-how of their employers, which gives them the opportunity to found a spin-out firm exploiting such knowledge. Despite (tacit) knowledge plays an important role in our setup as well, we address an entirely different issue, focusing on scenarios in which R&D employees gain knowledge based on the R&D investment of the incumbent firm and investigating the effects of the availability of complementary assets on entrepreneurship and investments.