Key Points
An incubatee must balance short and long term responses to new technical and market opportunities;
Incubatees must be encouraged to use control systems within their operations at the early stages; and
Interaction among incubatees is vital.
Key Points
The incubator must monitor and provide business assistance to incubatees; and
The incubation process should regularly infuse incubatees with the necessary resources.
Monitoring and Business Assistance
Hackett and Dilts (2004b) define monitoring and business assistance (M&BAI) as “the degree to which the incubator observes and helps incubatees with the development of their ventures, including helping them to [...]
Key point: Being the key determinant of an incubator’s effectiveness in option creation, the selection process should be properly managed.
A properly executed screening process ensures that resources are channeled only to those potential incubatees that truly need it. Hacket and Dilts state that “ideally, only those firms that are ‘weak-but-promising’ (weak due to lack of [...]
Key Points
The incubation program must be tailored to local needs;
The incubator manager and staff must be well equipped to manage present tenants.
Tailor-fitting to Local Community Needs
Many scholars agree that the general ‘fit’ of the incubator with the needs of the community to which it belongs is critical to its success (Allen and Rahman 1985; Campbell [...]
Key points
An incubator must be managed appropriately throughout its life just like any enterprise;
A strategically constructed advisory board is critical to the success of the incubator.
An Incubator’s Lifecycle
Allen (198 states that–similar to any other enterprise–the incubator itself goes through different stages in its lifecycle, namely start-up, business development, and maturity. Each stage is said [...]
Key point: A strong support network (strategic partners, external advisers, etc) is vital to the success of the incubatees and, consequently, the incubator.
An incubator is also a network of organizations providing skills, knowledge, motivation, real estate experience, as well as business and shared services to its tenants (Allen 1985). Thus, in order for an incubator [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
