Stimulating dynamic value: social capital and business incubation as a pathway to competitive success

By Mathew Hughes, Robert E. Morgan. 2007

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Studies of business incubation tend to examine how managing the incubator can help incubating firms create value. In the past, emphasis has centred on the provision of core business services and the design of the incubator, but more recent approaches focus on the provision of a rich network through which an incubating firm can engage in collaborations. We argue that such provisions dictate only the opportunities for value creation; how incubating firms choose to behave and pursue network opportunities dictates the extent to which these opportunities can be realised and, thus, the value creation. Firms' destiny lies in the hands of their combinations of strategic networking activities, and incubation outcomes do not occur because of their mere presence in an incubator. We identify two value-stimulating behaviours (networking activities)—resource pooling activity (resource-seeking behaviour) and strategic network involvement (knowledge-seeking behaviour)—and develop a value matrix that classifies incubation into four types of outcomes on the basis of the extensive versus narrow combinations of these activities. Each incubation outcome has merits and can be used to inform the evaluation of incubating firms and the relational strategies of their managers.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7fec7610a05f3b36cba829723db47641d1d3eb4

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Resourcing new businesses: social networks, bootstrapping and firm performance (2010, result): “These findings confirm studies of incubators in which entrepreneurs engaged in business start-ups utilise ‘brokers’ to develop contacts with weaker ties (Hughes, Ireland, and Morgan 2007 ).”
Service-based differentiation strategies for business incubators: Exploring external and internal alignment (2012, background): “…has overlooked this selection criterion (Aerts et al., 2007; Lumpkin and Ireland, 1988; Merrifield, 1987), even as it recognizes that business and networking support can lead to optimal incubation outcomes only if they are used extensively by tenants (Hughes et al., 2007; Hytti and Mäki, 2007).”
Meeting, mating, and intermediating: How incubators can overcome weak network problems in entrepreneurial ecosystems (2020, unknown): “(Bergek and Norrman, 2008; Patton, 2013), community-building (Bøllingtoft and Ulhøi, 2005; Hughes et al., 2007), and, sometimes, field-building (Amezcua et al.”
How network-based incubation helps start-up performance: a systematic review against the background of management theories (2017, background): “…a positive influence of network-based incubation on How network-based incubation helps start-up performance: a… 697 performance (Hansen et al. 2000; Hughes et al. 2007; Patton 2014) identify different incubation practices and use different performance measures from the articles that are much more…”
Implications of customer and entrepreneurial orientations for SME growth (2013, background): “In turn, it would be expected that the firm would encounter greater opportunities to enable growth and experience greater success as a consequence of it (e.g., Birley, 1985; Hughes et al., 2007).”
Planned Luck: How Incubators Can Facilitate Serendipity for Nascent Entrepreneurs Through Fostering Network Embeddedness (2020, background): “…networks, or psychological pressure (di Falco & Bulte, 2011; Gedajlovic et al., 2013; Khavul et al., 2009; Khayesi & George, 2011), pointing to the importance of examining how nascent entrepreneurs are—and become—beneficially embedded (Hughes et al., 2007; Jack, 2005; McKeever et al., 2014).”
Coworking-spaces: how a phenomenon of the sharing economy builds a novel trend for the workplace and for entrepreneurship (2016, background): “The form of interaction and community building might lead to different forms of value creation and incubation performance (Hughes et al. 2007).”