Business Incubators and HTSF Development: Setting an Agenda for Further Research

Abstract

This chapter places previous incubator-incubation literature within a relevant geographic and policy context, and extracts the reasons for the wide-scale adoption of the incubator model as a new venture creation mechanism. Arguments developed highlight that in the flurry of political lobbying during the 1990s–2000s leading to the rapid expansion of incubators-incubation across the European Union (EU), policy makers, practitioners and researchers alike failed to focus on what is key to understanding incubators’ true impact — internal incubation processes. A review of incubator development and impact at the level of two EU member states, Germany and Italy, is presented. This allows for a clearer context-bound sense of the state-of-art in incubator-incubation research to emerge. In turn it becomes possible to clearly highlight the direction of further research in the area where there is a stalemate between two opposing camps — one which has produced evidence to suggest that incubators make a significant difference in reducing start-up risk, and the other, which believes incubators do not give tax payers value-for-money. Structured in this way, this chapter is able to draw attention to the essential ‘missing ingredient’ in previous research which is key to understanding the impact incubators can have. This ingredient is the dynamics of the internal process of incubation.

Citation

Ahmad, A. and Ingle, S. (2013), "Business Incubators and HTSF Development: Setting an Agenda for Further Research", Oakey, R., Groen, A., Cook, G. and Van Der Sijde, P. (Ed.) New Technology-Based Firms in the New Millennium (New Technology Based Firms in the New Millennium, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 119-140. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1876-0228(2013)0000010009