Business Incubators: Effective Infrastructures or Waste of Public Money? Looking for a Theoretical Framework, Guidelines and Criteria
Ernesto Tavoletti
Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 2013, vol. 4, issue 4, 423-443
Abstract:
There is a wide literature about business incubators (BIs), especially about successful cases in high tech and knowledge intensive industries. Despite that, there is neither a viable integrative theory of effective business incubation nor clear guidelines about the preconditions for establishing BIs and their management. Such theory and guidelines are urgently needed because there is increasing evidence in the literature that, despite many successful cases and public policies supporting business incubation, most of BIs are not successful at all and serious doubts have emerged about the general effectiveness of business incubation and the advisability of investing public money in it. Based on a systematic literature review of the poor and scattered theoretical knowledge of effective business incubation, general principles are proposed to decide when a BI should be established and what it should do to be effective. The research is limited to non-profit BIs whose main goal is regional economic development as they represent the overwhelming majority of operating BIs. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013
Keywords: Business incubators; Business incubation; Theoretical contribution; New ventures; Start-ups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13132-012-0090-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jknowl:v:4:y:2013:i:4:p:423-443
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13132
DOI: 10.1007/s13132-012-0090-y
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of the Knowledge Economy is currently edited by Elias G. Carayannis
More articles in Journal of the Knowledge Economy from Springer, Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().