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Technology business incubators (TBIs) form an indispensable part of an entrepreneurial ecosystem for the promotion of tech start-ups across the global economy. However, they have evolved in varied forms over a period of time, in terms of typologies, sponsors and stakeholders, goals and objectives, functions and services offered, process of incubation support provided through hard and soft infrastructure, outcomes and achievements and even in terms of theoretical bases. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to review the extant literature on TBIs to arrive at a framework that explains how TBIs contribute to start-up generation.

This paper reviews extant empirical literature for a systematic evaluation to throw light on the various dimensions of TBIs: typology, goals and objectives, functions and services, process and provision of incubation support, outcomes and achievements. Further, after critically reviewing some of the theoretical propositions, it develops a conceptual framework combining pre-incubation, incubation and post-incubation processes of TBIs.

Based on literature understanding and some of the key theoretical constructs, a conceptual framework is developed comprising pre-incubation, incubation and post-incubation stages of start-up formation and graduation. The paper also identifies some prospective areas for future research.

Any empirical research on technology business incubation must focus on pre-incubation and post-incubation processes as much as on the incubation process, to derive meaningful implications and enhance the productivity of TBIs.

The conceptual framework derived out of the systematic literature review will enable further research and exploration of micro-aspects of pre-incubation, incubation and post-incubation phases across multiple dimensions.

Purpose: To identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of business incubator models and their potential use in worldwide. Methodology: We studied two international cases: (a) United States, (b) United Kingdom. Findings: The results highlight the similarities and differences between the countries. It adds knowledge for both academics and practitioners who are interested in business incubation. Value: This paper is the first to utilize the SWOT technique to analyze the business incubation field and provides recommendations to implement successful adoption of the incubator’s strengths. The potential of Business Incubators who act as models in worldwide and their contribution to the economy, the active role they play in the local, regional and national economic development are discussed. Implications: Adaptation of a Business Incubator Model leads to (1) the support of diverse economies, (2) the commercialization of new technologies, (3) job creation and (4) increases in wealth, given that weaknesses can be overcome.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of business incubation metrics based on an adaptation of the lean start-up (LS) framework on start-up survival after incubation. This study also analyzes the obstacles in implementing the LS framework as incubation metrics.

This study uses mixed methods. Quantitative research using multiple linear regression was applied to the data of 30 start-ups incubated at Bandung Techno Park for the 2014–2017 period and survival tracking data after the incubation. A qualitative approach to complete the explanatory work was conducted through in-depth interviews with 12 respondents, including start-up graduates from the incubation program, program managers and mentors.

This study confirms that several LS incubation metrics significantly affect start-up sustainability after incubation. In addition, this study also explains several problems in applying the LS discipline that needs attention to increase incubation success.

Research was conducted only at one technology business incubator (TBI) model that focuses on digital start-ups in the emerging ecosystem. Research results can be biased in different situations and ecosystems.

The explanation of the relationship of LS-based incubation metrics to the survival of start-ups, as well as the challenges of their implementation, can be a reference for TBI management to consider and prioritize intervention strategies, thereby improving TBI’s business processes and increasing the success rate of incubated start-ups.

The creation of university start-ups and spin-offs has become a key performance indicator mandatory for technology universities in Indonesia. The existence of TBI institutions in universities as channels of technology commercialization is essential. The incubator’s success in creating a new technology-based company will have a significant social impact on the surrounding environment.

Although the LS method is popular in start-up communities and among practitioners, it is rarely used in the incubation process at universities. These results can be considered for university TBIs to explore LS as an incubation management tool to increase the success rate of incubated start-ups.

This article aims to conduct a bibliometric study using structural and relational approaches amongst the extracted documents and investigates the connections between business incubation and entrepreneurship-related papers to describe the field comprehensively.

A total of 259 articles have been retrieved from Scopus database in order to conduct the bibliometric analysis. Performance analysis and science mapping techniques of bibliometrics have been used along with data visualisation software, i.e. VOSviewer and RStudio. The network collaboration and intellectual structures, i.e. bibliographic coupling, co-occurrence analysis, word cloud and trending topics, have been presented to identify the field’s latest trends, themes and development.

The findings highlight annual publication trends, including the most frequently cited articles, the most productive authors, countries and highly influential journals that contribute the most to the said field. The intellectual structures have been developed to identify research themes and trends by running co-occurrence analysis and bibliographic coupling. The findings of this study emphasize the value of technology transfer, mentorship programmes, entrepreneurship education and an emphasis on innovation and creativity through entrepreneurial universities and academia. These findings provide policymakers and administrative officials with crucial guidance for fortifying the pillars of entrepreneurship and education for the comprehensive development of the economy. Further, this article attempts to identify the most influential and relevant publications as well as the newest trends in the area of business incubation in combination with entrepreneurship.

The article contributes not only to broaden the scope of knowledge on the said research discipline but also to comprehend how the field has evolved over a period of time. This study also attracts the interest of scholars/academicians, leading to the significant production of scholarly documents in business incubation and entrepreneurship.

The field of entrepreneurship and business incubation is one of the important pillars for the growth and development of the economy. This piece contributes to this arena by focusing on the areas that must be taken care of by developing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and fostering the progress of startups. The fundamentals of this research highlight the importance of mentorship programs, entrepreneurship education, technology transfer and a focus on innovation and creativity through entrepreneurial education and efforts by universities/academia, giving an important direction to the policymakers and administration for strengthening the pillar of entrepreneurship and education for the holistic development of the economy.

Business incubation is an emerging field of academic research connected to startups, venture formation and entrepreneurship ecosystems, making it a potential scholarly discipline. This study presents a thorough bibliometric analysis over the last three decades, offering comprehensive details on the most significant developments in the field of business incubation. Moreover, the various analytical methods applied to this study make it more attractive.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and summarize growth and development of technology business incubation system in India. The study in this route tries to explore factors which include various actors and agencies influencing the process of incubation and innovation.

The paper in route to access the role of different actors and agencies situated around the incubation process is being executed through the systems of innovation framework. Data have been collected from the secondary sources including government department, ministries and other sources.

The study besides providing an in-depth analysis of the incubation process in India finds that the process is relatively new in the Indian context and lacks a profound policy for escalating the process of technological incubation. The study also finds that over the years India’s innovation potential has escalated significantly which in a way can be seen as an optimistic result in the growth and development of technology business incubation.

The proposed study is one of the few in this category, especially while analyzing technology business incubation with respect to India. The study also tries to add on literature in the domain of technology incubation especially in the context of India.

The ability of tenant firms to survive after incubation is dependent on the relevant capabilities they acquired during the incubation process. Several studies have established the critical roles of incubation in fostering entrepreneurship and innovation at local, national and regional levels but the processes and mechanisms of technological learning and the capability building of the tenants has received much less attention. In response to the situation, the purpose of this paper is to assess various technological learning mechanisms through which tenant firms in the incubation system in Nigeria acquired the relevant capabilities (both technological and non-technological) that will sustain them after graduation.

The information was gathered through a preliminary survey and questionnaires were administered to elicit information from the tenant firms and the incubator managers. Data collected were analysed and presented using descriptive statistics.

The internal learning mechanisms of the tenant firms were found to be fair as firms possessed good internal capabilities that helped to absorb and adapt foreign technologies to suit their individual production needs and this was demonstrated by the quality of personnel employed by the tenant firms. The study revealed poor interaction between the tenants and knowledge institutions and training programmes and facilities also played significant roles in technological capability acquisition of tenants firms. The main factors that ranked highly and influenced technological learning among the firms included the need for product improvement, the need to increase production, turnover and profit, the need to reduce production costs and compete well after graduation, while the need to enter foreign market and commercialise technology ranked average with regards to success in technological learning.

The results of the study may not be generalised because of limited sample.

The study concluded that the technological learning capabilities of the firms could be better enhanced with adequate training and training facilities, robust linkages with knowledge centres and compliance with incubation regulations.

This study provided information on various technological learning mechanisms through which tenant firms in the incubation system in Nigeria acquire relevant capabilities (technological and non-technological) that sustain them after graduation. The study also contributed to the growing literature on incubation system and entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of the incubation industry, government funding, and the intensity of funding for different services. Because the incubation industry has particular characteristics, government funding varies for different services, and its intensity varies with service.

Government funding is classified as incubation subsidy and incubation incentive. Besides, incubation services include property management, business mentoring as well as investment and financing. Based on this, this study examines the influence mechanism of different subsidy and incentive on incubation services by using the generalized propensity score matching method.

The empirical results show that subsidy and incentive have an inverse-U shape effect on property management service, but a linear effect on business guidance service. Furthermore, subsidy does not affect investment and financing service, but incentive that can have a significant impact.

The theme of government funding and incubator services plays an important role in helping entrepreneurs expand their businesses. Incubation subsidy and incentive can provide important support to help enterprises obtain more preferential loans, technical services and technical support in the incubator. Applying it to incubator services can provide better technology and entrepreneurship guidance. These services can help new entrepreneurs understand products and markets, and how to develop more successfully in the early stage. In short, incubators supported by government funds can provide important support to entrepreneurs to help them successfully realize their business plans.

This chapter places previous incubator-incubation literature within a relevant geographic and policy context, and extracts the reasons for the wide-scale adoption of the incubator model as a new venture creation mechanism. Arguments developed highlight that in the flurry of political lobbying during the 1990s–2000s leading to the rapid expansion of incubators-incubation across the European Union (EU), policy makers, practitioners and researchers alike failed to focus on what is key to understanding incubators’ true impact — internal incubation processes. A review of incubator development and impact at the level of two EU member states, Germany and Italy, is presented. This allows for a clearer context-bound sense of the state-of-art in incubator-incubation research to emerge. In turn it becomes possible to clearly highlight the direction of further research in the area where there is a stalemate between two opposing camps — one which has produced evidence to suggest that incubators make a significant difference in reducing start-up risk, and the other, which believes incubators do not give tax payers value-for-money. Structured in this way, this chapter is able to draw attention to the essential ‘missing ingredient’ in previous research which is key to understanding the impact incubators can have. This ingredient is the dynamics of the internal process of incubation.

The paper aims to review existing performance indicators in technology business incubators (TBIs) and propose some new indicators with a focus on incubation activities in higher educational institutes (HEIs) of India.

Performance indicators of various types of incubators were identified from research papers followed by interview, consultation and suggestion from experts of the subject. Nature of interrelationship between the identified indicators has been established with the help of Interpretive Structural Modelling methodology and Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment analysis.

Number of ideas came for screening and number of ideas converted to start-ups, survival rate of incubatees is the indicators which have the highest driving power followed by time taken in screening an idea and number of failed or rejected ideas returned back into incubation. Few indicators (driving indicators) are affecting performance of other indicators as well.

Some performance indicators are proposed which can be used for measuring performance of technology incubators in India. The actual implications will be known when these findings are used to assess performance of some technology incubator. This also is the limitation of the study that some cases can be included to validate the findings of this research.

A total of 15 performance indicators for measuring performance of TBIs in Indian HEIs have been proposed. The proposed indicators will help incubator management to prioritize the efforts and resource allocation.

TBIs are looked upon as mechanism for promoting entrepreneurial culture in Indian HEIs. Their success is well linked to growth of society. This research will help technology incubators to identify the most important factors in incubation process. Performance improvement will directly affect society in whole. Culture of IEE (Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Employment ) can be achieved through technology incubators

Identification of new indicators for performance measurement of incubators in Indian HEIs is the novelty of this research. This has a lot of value due to multilevel hierarchy model.

This paper discusses the services and support from one of the government design-based business incubators in Hong Kong. The characteristics of a design business incubator are explained, and a multiple-case study indicates the perspectives of incubatees from different design disciplines after their graduation from the incubation programme.

The research under discussion in this paper was based on eight design incubatees in different design disciplines within two years of incubation period, all of whom had participated in one of the government-funded business incubation programmes for designers in Hong Kong. The programme is unique because there are no other government-based incubation programmes for designers in Hong Kong. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect feedback from incubatees in areas ranging from terms of service to support of the incubation programme.

The services of training, mentorship and finance were found to be the most important to design start-ups. Financial support and flexible funding allocation were another important issue for design incubatees, but training in these subject areas was not included in the incubation programme. However, it was confirmed that funding provided may have helped a number of the incubatees in developing their start-up businesses as a result of the reduced financial burden and office allocation.

The research focused on one incubation programme because of the lack of incubation programmes for designers in Hong Kong, therefore future research which compares different types of business incubation programmes is suggested.

The outcomes of the research not only identified the possible areas of development and improvement of business incubation in entrepreneurship but they will also be useful for the government, universities, institutions, designers, policy makers, entrepreneurs and practitioners. These, in addition to industry stakeholders who want to evaluate their entrepreneurship programmes and develop their plans for potential development in incubation- or entrepreneurial-related programmes or training, especially in the area of design, will find the results useful.