This paper analyses the factors that influence opportunity recognition (OR) of academic spin‐offs (ASOs) from a contingency perspective. We focus on factors linked to the academic entrepreneur and propose that their relevance for explaining OR in ASOs depends on the context in which these firms operate: discovery (the necessary information for entrepreneurs to assess the new opportunities is available in the market) versus creation (complete information about opportunity exploitation and the likelihood of achieving certain outcomes is not available in the market). Results obtained in a sample of 167 Spanish ASOs show that, in a discovery context, academic entrepreneurs' OR is positively related to entrepreneurial self‐efficacy, previous managerial experience and access to academic and industry networks. In a creation context, only entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and access to industry networks become critical to OR, whereas previous managerial experience exerts a negative effect. Our results also show that the most relevant factor in a discovery context is previous managerial experience, while in a creation context, entrepreneurial self‐efficacy is the most significant.