Motivations and obstacles to networking in a university business incubator

Business incubators strive to develop robust business and social networks to bring value to their resident companies in the form of intellectual and material resources. Yet, information about what motivates resident companies to participate in networking activities and the obstacles they face in trying to build effective networks is limited. This study employs a communication perspective to examine the process of incubation in an award-winning university business incubator. Using a combination of network analysis and in-depth interviews, the case study reveals the nature of communication in the internal network of 18 resident companies and the incubator administrators. Despite being on the cutting edge of innovations in technology use, study findings reveal face-to-face interaction in the incubator is predominant. The physical proximity of resident companies at the incubator influences who they talk to the most, suggesting incubator site design is important in creating an entrepreneurial environment. The case study also indicates resident company motivations for networking include a strong desire for social support to help manage stress, security of membership in an in-group, and increased access to material or information resources. The primary obstacles residents face to participating in networking and building relationships with each other include extreme time limitations during the early start-up phase, lack of ongoing information about other residents, and lack of trust related to keeping information about innovations and funding sources secure. Implications of these findings and recommendations for incubator managers for building successful and sustainable communication networks conclude the article.     

Beyond incubation: an analysis of firm survival and exit dynamics in the post-graduation period

With regard to the survival rates of business incubator (BI) firms, the literature mainly presents findings of failure rates only during the incubation period. Little is known about the survival or exit dynamics of firms after leaving the incubator facilities. This study approaches this research question by examining the survival of 352 firms from five German BIs after their graduation. The findings suggest that graduation causes an immediate negative effect on survivability that lasts up to 3 years after leaving the incubators. Furthermore, heterogeneous patterns of post-graduation exit dynamics between the BIs were observed. It was also found that performance during the incubation period is an indicator of the propensity of business closure after graduation. This study offers valuable insights and implications for all stakeholders of BI-initiatives.      

Procedural justice and regulatory compliance

This is a study of perceptions of the procedural justice of a business regulatory process among 341 Australian chief executives of small organizations. Only mixed support is found for the notion that procedural justice perceived by chief executives explains changes in the compliance of the organizations they run. A factor analysis suggests that five facets of procedural justice—consistency, correctability, control, impartiality, and ethicality—can be combined to form a single measure. The decision accuracy facet was not part of the general procedural justice factor. It is just one of these facets, control, that is significantly associated with changing compliance. As the chief executive's perception that they have had some control over the enforcement process increases, organizational compliance improves. The procedural justice measures correlate more strongly with regulatee satisfaction for this regulatory regime than do regulatory outcomes.     

Do graduated university incubator firms benefit from their relationship with university incubators?

Business incubators have become a popular policy option and economic development intervention tool. However, recent research shows that incubated firms may not benefit significantly from their incubator relationships, and may even be more vulnerable to failure post departure (graduation) from an incubator. These findings suggest that the impact of business incubation on new venture viability may be contingent on the type of support offered by an incubator and attributes of business environments within which incubation services are provided. Incubation services that protect and isolate ventures from key resource dependencies may hinder venture development and increase subsequent vulnerability to environmental demands. Alternatively, incubation services that help ventures connect and align with key resource dependencies are likely to promote firm survival. We propose that incubators vary in the services and resources they offer, and that university incubators typically provide greater connectivity and legitimacy with respect to important contingencies associated with key industry and community stakeholders. This leads us to propose that university affiliation is an important contingency that affects the relationship between firms’ participation in incubators and their subsequent performance. The purpose of this study is to evaluate this contingency by examining whether firms graduating from university incubators attain higher levels of post-incubation performance than firms participating in non-university affiliated incubators. We test this by evaluating the performance of a sample of graduated firms associated with the population of university-based incubators in the US contrasted against the performance of a matched cohort of non-incubated firms. The analysis uses an enhanced dataset that tracks the number of employees, sales, and the entry and graduation (departure) points of incubated firms from a university incubation program, so as to delineate the scope of influence of the incubator.     

Entrepreneurial universities in two European regions: a case study comparison

An entrepreneurial university is a natural incubator that tries to provide a supportive environment in which the university community can explore, evaluate and exploit ideas that could be transformed into social and economic entrepreneurial initiatives. Entrepreneurial universities are involved in partnerships, networks and other relationships to generate an umbrella for interaction, collaboration and co-operation. Rapid developments in science, the multidisciplinary nature of frontier research, legislative changes such as the Bayh–Dole Act and demands from business and society have shaped knowledge-based entrepreneurship within universities. Despite sharing similar historical backgrounds, economic conditions and cultural and social structures, entrepreneurial universities in most countries remain distinct from one another by their institutional arrangements, traditions and characteristics unique to each organization. Interestingly, no comparative research has been conducted to understand the similarities and differences of the conditioning factors and the outcomes/outputs of entrepreneurial universities in different regions that share similar social, economic and political conditions. This paper addresses this research deficit, adopting institutional economics and resource-based view. We compare entrepreneurial universities in two European regions (Spain and Ireland) using an in-depth qualitative approach based on multiple case studies (two Spanish universities and two Irish universities) between 2006 and 2010. The findings provide organizational practices and approaches relevant to the transformation process of other regional universities seeking to become entrepreneurial.     

University technology commercialization through new venture projects: an assessment of the French regional incubator program

This article assesses the performance of a technology business incubator program, established by the French government to support innovative new science and technology-based firms (NSTBF) that seek to commercialize laboratory research results. With a resource-based view and an institutional approach, this study predicts why some incubators may be more successful than others in supporting the development of NSTBF. An original longitudinal data set represents the results of a public incubator program, funded following the passage of a 1999 French law on innovation and research. The findings refer to a sample of 25 operationally active incubators and their 1200 graduated new ventures. This study contributes to the literature on business incubation by showing the importance of various incubator resource inputs for aiding NSTBF projects. It thus provides useful and timely feedback for researchers and policy makers.     

White-Collar Crime and Police Crime: Rotten Apples or Rotten Barrels?

In the research literature on white-collar crime, there seems to be a tendency to claim individual failure rather than systems failure. Occupational crime is often emphasized at the expense of corporate crime. In the research literature on misconduct and crime by police officers, however, there seems to be a tendency to claim systems failure. It is argued that police crime is a result of bad practice, lack of resources or mismanagement, rather than acts of criminals. Based on two empirical studies in Norway of business and police crime, this paper is concerned with the extent to which the rotten apple theory versus the rotten barrel theory can explain crime in business organizations and police organizations.     

Inside the black box of business incubation: Study B—scale assessment, model refinement, and incubation outcomes

Due to a lack of valid and reliable scales, few studies have sought to describe and measure the business incubation process. After rigorously developing and pre-testing scales intended to measure the incubation process (Study A), we collected data from 53 incubators operating in the US in order to (a) systematically examine the incubation process, and (b) validate the scales. Accordingly, this study offers (1) new, validated scales for measuring the process of incubating new ventures, (2) empirically-based refinements to a theoretical model of the incubation process, and (3) data on business incubation outcomes that are very useful for incubator planning and benchmarking purposes.

Corporate Incubators: Industrial R&D and What Universities can Learn from them

The explosive growth of incubation has seen a concurrent and significant increase in research on and knowledge of the incubation phenomenon. However, instead of comprehensively differentiating between non-profit and for-profit incubators, research has described a whole array of partly overlapping archetypes, thus missing out on important aspects. This article first offers two arguments validating a framework of what non-profit university incubators can learn from for-profit corporate incubators before presenting the framework itself. While corporate incubators are for-profit organizations with which to enhance a corporation’s technology development, university incubators try to leverage technological insights from the university in a similar manner. In accordance with their respective missions, organizational structures, incubator processes and resource flows, it is possible to transfer lessons learned from two corporate incubator archetypes—the fast-profit incubator and leveraging incubator—to the world of university incubator. Our empirical findings are based on in-depth case studies of 25 companies through 52 semi-structured interviews with managers of corporate incubators of large technology-intensive corporations in Europe and the U.S., two EU incubator benchmarking surveys and five interviews with the heads of technology transfer offices of two top technology universities.     

A control group study of incubators’ impact to promote firm survival

It is widely unclear as to whether start-up firms supported by publicly-initiated incubator initiatives have higher survival rates than comparable start-up firms that have not received support by such initiatives. This paper contributes to the underlying discussion by performing a large-scale matched-pairs analysis of the long-term survival of 371 incubator firms (after their graduation) from five German incubators and a control group of 371 comparable non-incubated firms. The analysis covers a 10-year time span. To account for the problem of selection bias, a non-parametric matching approach is applied to identify an appropriate control group. For neither of the five incubator locations, we find statistically significant higher survival probabilities for firms located in incubators compared to firms located outside those incubator organizations. For three incubator locations the analysis reveals statistically significant lower chances of survival for those start-ups receiving support by an incubator. The empirical results, therefore, raise some doubts regarding the impacts of incubation on long-term firm survival.     

The Role of Incubators in the Entrepreneurial Process

We outline a model that improves our understanding of the role of incubators in the entrepreneurial process. Specifically, we focus on the impact of the services offered, namely infrastructure, coaching and networks, on the graduation rates of the respective incubators tenants. The model is tested among three different types of incubators, for-profit, non-profit, university-based incubators. Based on our qualitative findings, we conclude that our initial model is ineffective, in the sense that it cannot fully explain the role of the incubators in facilitating entrepreneurship. Interviews with directors of incubator centers were also carried out simultaneously. Further analysis of the results along with interview responses from incubator directors, led us to propose a more comprehensive model to explain how incubators affect the entrepreneurial process.     

National laboratories as business incubators and region builders

Public sector labs do not appear to have generated as much regional business spinoff as universities and research-intensive businesses. This difference may be explained in large part by the disparate capabilities for and attitudes toward new-firm incubation on the part of parent institutions and other anchor tenants. We believe that federal lab personnel systems, research cultures, geographical isolation, management preferences, and complex public interest issues are responsible. These phenomena are explored in an intensive case study of startups associated with Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Interviews conducted with 33 firms confirm many barriers to incubation, but also reveal some advantages offered by public labs and suggest that changes in attitude, culture, and policy can make a difference. We explore the difficult issues of property rights assignment, public employee conflict-of-interest rules, and the use of public sector equity in spinoffs, and we conclude that startup efforts have been underfunded. Lab partnerships with large corporations in comparison are expensive, hoard labor, and are less effective at transferring technology. Recommendations for improvement of the incubation process include entrepreneurial leave and training, streamlining of conflict-of-interest, patent, and licensing procedures, and lab based efforts to connect would be entrepreneurs with sources of business assistance, space and capital.     

The university and business incubation: Technology transfer through entrepreneurial development

This paper reviews university programs that seek to promote technology transfer through entrepreneurial development. It describes fourkey factors (talent, technology, capital, and know-how) that must be linked for successful transfer, and focuses on the new-business incubator as an important mechanism for synergizing these factors in the university. The paper also shows how the incubator supports the development of new technology companies by helping them build credibility, shorten the learning curve, and solve problems faster, and by providing access to entrepreneurial networks. Empirical data on selected university incubators are presented.     

Elements that underpin high-tech business incubation processes

The UK government’s emphasis upon knowledge as a key competitive differentiator has led to the establishment of incubators within universities to support the commercialization of ideas; however understanding of the process by which research ideas are commercialized is limited. The findings in this paper, based on a case study of the high-tech incubator at the University of Southampton, suggest that some of the salient factors that strengthen the incubation process include; a steady flow of new ideas, an empathy with founders, the creation and maintenance of internal and external networks and appropriate exit strategies for firms leaving the incubator.     

电子商务与农户创业行为——基于农村合作组织的电子商务平台构建

创业信息缺乏是制约农户创业的一个重要瓶颈。基于创业农户的信息需求和电子商务信息平台的构建等视角,本文认为,以农村合作组织为基础的电子商务平台,可以为创业农户提供商业信息、技术信息和资本信息,可以为农户提供完善的电子商务服务,同时还可以扩展农村合作组织自身的信息交流能力。     

How do universities shape founding teams? Social proximity and informal mechanisms of knowledge transfer in student entrepreneurship

This paper investigates informal mechanisms of knowledge transfer (KT) from a local university to entrepreneurial teams comprising students and recent graduates. While the extant literature on university-industry KT largely focuses on formal mechanisms aimed at stimulating entrepreneurial initiatives in high-tech (HT) sectors, it overlooks the effect of university-industry KT on nascent entrepreneurship in low-medium tech (LMT) sectors. To fill this gap in the literature, we carry out a mixed-method analysis that exploits a dataset of 154 new business ideas (and 535 team members) presented at a business plan competition in Rimini from 2010 to 2017. Our findings highlight a robust relationship between educational field and the R&D intensity of entrepreneurial projects: students take advantage of the knowledge acquired at university to develop entrepreneurial projects with higher technological content than those planned by non-graduates. Furthermore, the empirical evidence shows that the local university nurtures the formation of ties among students and recent graduates enrolled in the same courses and fosters their efforts to launch new ventures. Finally, the qualitative analysis identifies relevant and non-traditional mechanisms of KT that are being exploited by nascent entrepreneurs to develop their business ideas in the LMT and HT sectors.

     

A business process improvement framework for knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial ventures

Pushed by the transition towards the knowledge economy, as well as several other change drivers, an ever-increasing number of knowledge intensive ventures are relying on operational knowledge intensity in order to generate value. Through their interaction with their varied stakeholders—from actors within their supply chains to educational and financial institutions—knowledge intensive enterprises are increasingly becoming a key component of regional economic stability. Within their complex environment, these organisations lack the support of suitable frameworks to inform their efforts to optimise, adapt and improve their underlying business processes in order to maximise the efficiency of their performance and pursue growth ambitions. This paper examines the distinct nature of knowledge intensive entrepreneurial ventures (KIEs) and the applicability of current business process improvement (BPI) frameworks to their setting. Finally, a KIE-oriented business process improvement framework is developed through an integrative adaptation of the concepts of knowledge intensity and knowledge management to the principles of business process redesign and re-engineering reported in existing literature. The proposed framework contributes to the existing literature in the subject of BPI modelling for knowledge intensive entrepreneurial ventures by addressing a distinct set of improvement concerns that this type of organisations face at a process level.     

Do prosocial motives have any business in business

Challenging the assumption that the only motive in business is egoism (self-interest), four distinct potential prosocial motives are identified: egoism, collectivism, altruism, and principlism. It is suggested that each of these motives may, under certain nonextraordinary conditions, operate in business settings. None is a sure-fire source of ethical business practices, however. Each may at times lead to action that makes more people better off and fewer people worse off; each may also lead to action that does the opposite.I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.—Adam Smith,The Wealthe of Nations (1776/1976), I., p. 478.     

The M&;A dynamics of European science-based entrepreneurial firms

This paper investigates the dynamics of a sample of 131 science-based entrepreneurial firms (SBEFs), selected out of 500 innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that went public in Europe in the period 1995–2003. We found that the market for control of these firms was active, with most of our sample firms being acquired after their Initial Public Offering (IPO), usually by companies operating within the same industry. Floated SBEFs showed a higher propensity to be acquired than independent firms; this distinction persisted after controlling for intellectual capital and other possible determinants. While university affiliation enhanced attractiveness in the eyes of other companies, it negatively affected the propensity for acquisition. We argue that university-based firms do contribute to the technology transfer process, as evidenced by the widespread interest of the business world in investing in these firms. The creation of a SBEF is a first step in the process of commercial exploitation of university-research, while the subsequent step of going public is a sign of the success of this entrepreneurial venture. The take-over of SBEFs may be a final outcome of the process of knowledge diffusion.