The literature on academic entrepreneurship literature has paid close attention to the beneficial and detrimental impacts of spinoffs on reputation, finance, and technology transfer. Less well-researched, however, is the connection between spinoff processes and their impact on academic research. To explore this relationship, we conducted interviews and collected archival data from forty STEM laboratories in France that has recently produced spinoffs. We adopted an iterative, mixed-method approach combining case histories of the laboratories with coincidence analysis (CNA). Our analyses identify three spinoff processes that are consistently associated with beneficial research impact, including one connected with spinoff failure. In each of these situations, the roles, motivations, and relationships between actors during and after spinoff are central to explaining the catalysing effect on laboratory research.