Systema Incubatorae - Classifying the Nests: A Quantitative Study Using a Type-Specific Approach to Business Incubator Assessment

Sammanfattning: Research on business incubators has focused on various aspects of these organizations. Two of these aspects are the research themes of incubator types and incubator performance. This study examines these two themes together and analyzes what effects incubator types have on the performance outcomes of Swedish incubators. To do this, a sample of 298 firms from 23 different incubators is classified into two groups of generalist and specialist incubators and analyzed using OLS regression and negative binomial regression. The results show that firms from specialist incubators outperform their counterparts from generalists in terms of amount of funding received and the number of patents registered, but do not show any significant differences in terms of revenues and number of employees. These findings are both consistent and contradicting to previous research results and highlight the importance of taking incubator types into account in incubator performance research. As such, the study contributes with a type-specific methodological research approach in incubator performance analysis. The researchers view this approach as a promising way forward in business incubator research because of the way it unifies two major themes in research and its potential ability to consolidate the field of incubator types. From a practical perspective, the results can help entrepreneurs to make more informed decisions about which incubator to enter.