Critical Role and Screening Practices of European Business Incubators

By Kris Aerts, P. Matthyssens, K. Vandenbempt. 2007

503 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Business incubators guide starting enterprises through their growth process and as such constitute a strong instrument to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. In this article we sketch the European business incubator landscape. Then we describe screening practices by European business incubators in 2003 and compare these results with the American incubators in the 1980s. In the last phase an exploratory link between screening practices and performance, measured in terms of tenant failure, is established. Most incubators do not screen potential tenants on a balanced set of factors, but concentrate either on the characteristics of the tenant's market or on the characteristics of the tenant's management team. However, we found that the tenant survival rate is positively related to a more balanced screening profile. Based on our study results, we propose some recommendations for the main stakeholders in the field: authorities, incubators and innovative entrepreneurs.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd6274ca3564e591038d22747afffa4d16e209be

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Citations in the corpus

Specialization as strategy for business incubators: An assessment of the Central German Multimedia Center (2008, background): “However, Aerts et al. (2007) do not find a statistically significant effect on tenant failure rates for European BIs supporting specific sectors.”
A control group study of incubators’ impact to promote firm survival (2010, background): “Spatially concentrated, subsidized rental space, including offices, laboratories, and small production space, helps to reduce early-stage fixed costs through colocation and shared utilisation (Aerts et al., 2007; Chan and Lau, 2005; McAdam and McAdam, 2008).”
Cooperation patterns of incubator firms and the impact of incubator specialization: Empirical evidence from Germany (2010, background): “Specialized business incubators (SBIs) are increasingly perceived by local decision-makers as equivalent alternatives to diversified business incubators (DBIs) (Cooke et al., 2006; Aerts et al., 2007; Schwartz and Hornych, 2008).”
Informal university technology transfer: a comparison between the United States and Germany (2010, background): “…Zurich, Switzerland focus on the institutions (e.g., technology transfer offices), the agents involved in technology commercialization, academic spin-offs, university-industry cooperative research centers or science parks, and incubators (Bozeman 2000; Aerts et al. 2007; Rothaermel et al. 2007).”
Revisiting incubation performance (2012, unknown): “problem is often compounded as “objective and direct performance indicators are very hard to obtain” [13].”
Transnational diaspora entrepreneurship in emerging markets: Bridging institutional divides (2010, background): “Since the creation of the first business incubator in the United States in 1959 (Hackett and Dilts, 2004), incubators have become increasingly commonplace in many other areas of the world (Aernoudt, 2004; Allen and McCluskey, 1990; Bergek and Norrman, 2008).”
Service-based differentiation strategies for business incubators: Exploring external and internal alignment (2012, methodology): “…research does not seem to make this distinction and instead suggests that a balanced selection process, using all these criteria, is preferable (Aerts et al., 2007; Lumpkin and Ireland, 1988; Merrifield, 1987), and does not include a recognition that specialists might need different selection…”
Explaining incubators using firm analogy (2009, background): “In other words, an incubator is an environment for initiation and growth of these firms (Aerts et al., 2007; Chan and Lau, 2005; Löfsten and Lindelöf, 2001; Lindelöf, 2002; Mian, 1994).”
The Evolution of Business Incubators: Comparing demand and supply of business incubation services across different incubator generations (2012, background): “Training is also often available within BIs (Aerts et al., 2007; Barrow, 2001) and has been found to positively influence tenants’ performance (Peña, 2004).”
Situated regional university incubation: A multi-level stakeholder perspective (2016, background): “Conceptually, university incubators connect science, technology, education, knowledge, entrepreneurial talent and capital (Smilor and Gill 1986; Mian, 1996; Aerts et al., 2007; Bergek and Norrman, 2008).”
The role of science parks and business incubators in converging countries: Evidence from Portugal (2010, background): “The success of SPs such as Sillicon Valley in California, Route 128 in Massachussetts (Castells and Hall, 1994; Saxenian, 1994), the Research Park Triangle in North Carolina (Link and Scott, 2003a) and Cambridge in the UK (Koh et al., 2005) has influenced other countries to replicate the SP model, s”
Beyond incubation: an analysis of firm survival and exit dynamics in the post-graduation period (2009, background): “Only a few steps have been undertaken to identify the BI-related factors that are associated with the survival and failure of (graduate) firms (see e.g., Westhead and Batstone 1999; Rothaermel and Thursby 2005a; Aerts et al. 2007 for some exceptions).”