Incubation Processes; A multiple case study of Swedish business incubators

Abstract

The existence of the business incubators is undeniably important for the economic progress. As any organization, even the incubators are affected by the changing environment which calls for actions in maintaining a certain flexibility of the incubator, insuring the adaptability to the ever changing demands. In this paper the author examines the business incubator’s incubation process in a “white-box” manner, as it has been pointed out in the literature as one of the most important elements of an incubator. Considering the little amount of studies on this subject, the author decided to conduct the research in an inductive way, allowing very detailed information to flow in and emergence of themes and categories. The framework of the study was based on two models and it follows three directions: the phases of an incubation process, the activities performed, the resources needed for undertaking these activities and the goals of each phase. The aim is to answer general questions like “how does the incubation process looks like?”, “what is it being done within the incubation process?” and “why are the activities performed at the respective stage?”. The results have led to a better insight in the incubation processes, interesting observations and even a new possible framework that can be tested for categorizing business incubators in Sweden or it can be interweaved together with another proposed framework.