Business incubation and entrepreneurial competencies: an exploration of relationships

This research was aimed at developing a conceptual framework to provide a foundation for studying the relationship between business incubation and entrepreneurial competencies. While there are over 3,000 business incubators worldwide and the phenomena of business incubation to support entrepreneurial ventures has grown rapidly over the last 3 decades (European Commission, 2000); there remains a significant gap in knowledge regarding whether the incubation process is actually effective (Hackett and Dilts, 2004). In much of the research on incubation, the incubator, rather than the ‘incubatee’ (entrepreneur / entrepreneurial team) is the unit of analysis. Among the few studies on incubatees, the measure of success has been ‘business survival’, ‘business growth’, ‘effective technology transfer’ or ‘getting to market’ (see Phan and Siegel (2006) for a comprehensive review of the research). O’Connor, Burnett and Hancock (2009) examined the relationship between business incubation and education and found that both education and incubation revolved around the development of opportunity. They defined the incubation process as one which provided support services, networking opportunities, mentoring and physical space while education was aimed at developing the entrepreneur rather than their business and was more concerned with delivering the skills and knowledge to manage and act upon opportunities. We argue that the learning aspect of incubation has been largely ignored and many ventures may have ‘failed’ but the entrepreneurs have benefited from the incubation learning process, which in turn, has flow on benefits that may be easily overlooked. In this paper, we report on the findings of the first phase of a research project involving incubatees and incubator managers in Adelaide and Singapore to explicate the learning experience of incubatees.