The role of IT-focused business incubators in managing regional development and innovation

Abstract

Governments are increasingly focusing on achieving growth at regional, national and international levels. Research and practice indicates that innovation is a key driver for achieving this goal. Unfortunately, finding efficient ways to promote and manage innovation is not a straightforward task. It depends on potentially conflicting parameters that are critical for turning innovative ideas into local and national economic prosperity. To address the challenge, regional and national governments are adopting best-practice vehicles of innovation management. In this article, we focus on one such vehicle, namely business incubators. After presenting basic definitions, we provide quantitative and qualitative research findings on the positive effects that incubators may have on regional development. These findings are often constrained by lack of access of researchers in the internal structure of incubators, thus providing only an “outside-in” viewpoint. Our involvement in the development of an IT-focused incubator in the UK provided new research insights, from an “inside-out” perspective. The latter is presented in terms of an integrated incubator model and the structure of its components is described and analyzed.