The Incubator as a Strategy Component

Key Point: The incubator must be a component of a local economic development strategy.
A number of researchers have confirmed the positive impact of business incubators in increasing a new enterprise’s chances of survival. Additionally, incubators have been found to be more cost-effective than programs that attempt to attract existing firms to a region (Markley and [...]

Dispelling the ‘Theory vs. Practical Experience’ Debate

It’s unfortunate how the word ‘theory’ has been misused in everyday speech such that it has lost its original meaning. These days ‘theory’ is considered synonymous to ‘impractical’, ‘unrealistic’, and even ‘speculation’. The result of this misunderstanding is significant: Students take important lessons for granted by discounting them as mere theory, preferring, instead, to find [...]

The Incubation Process

This is part three of my studies in business incubation. In case you missed the first two, here are Part 1 and Part 2.
Despite the growing literature on business incubators, very little existing research focus on the incubation process (Hackett and Dilts 2004a) even when the NBIA identified it as a more important factor [...]

Classifying Business Incubators

This is the second part of my studies in business incubators. The first part may be found here.
To aid in the analysis of business incubators, particularly in identifying issues related to incubator evaluation and recommended practices, a classification system needs to be adopted (Albert and Gaynor 2001). Various researchers have provided different means for categorizing [...]

Defining Marketing

The American Marketing Association states that:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
However, a common mistake that I observe among marketing practitioners is the failure to realise that it is the [...]

What is a Business Incubator?

This is an excerpt from my paper on business incubation. From this point on, I will post the results of my studies in smaller, more manageable parts.
Extant literature is yet to provide a standard definition of business incubators and business incubation. Definitions can be as all-encompassing as that of Kuratko and LaFollete where [...]

Innovation does not mean R&D

True, we are now operating in a knowledge economy. That is, an economy where the central source of value is knowledge: a world where the one who has the most knowledge and produces the most number of innovations will be the winner of the day. However, I find it naïve to think that a country [...]

Service Quality: A Literature Review

In this paper, I review the work of Parasuraman et al. on service quality, particularly their gaps model and SERVQUAL, a marketing survey tool used for measuring a firm’s level of service quality. I then compare it with more updated marketing survey tools and present examples of each in the appendices.
Service Quality: A Literature Review [...]

Absorptive Capacity

Absorptive capacity refers to an organisation’s ability to acquire and internalise new knowledge. Absorptive capacity is said to be composed of two elements: prior knowledge and intensity of effort. When a firm has a large knowledge base, acquiring additional related knowledge will be easier for a firm. However, if the firm is trying to acquire [...]