Firms

Business incubators have been established worldwide as tools for stimulating entrepreneurship. Governments and universities alike promote incubators with the aim of supporting new companies, ultimately hoping to bring jobs and prosperity to their regions. Despite the per-vasiveness of incubators within entrepreneurship policy, their purported impact seldom survives academic scru-tiny. But beyond the multitude of models or the inner mechanisms of incubators, there is no conceptual clarity as to why results are persistently inconclusive. This book provides a fresh insight on how incubators operate in practice. Firstly, there is an analysis of the evolution of business incubators in recent decades, with a particular focus upon technology oriented business in-cubators, alongside the mechanisms of business support delivery. The results presented demonstrate a strong symbiotic relationship between the tenant population and the service portfolio on offer. This research contrib-utes to current debates around business incubation im-pacts, revealing the relationships between management practices and incubation impacts. This book is therefore essential reading for academics engaged with techno-logical entrepreneurship as well as business incubation managers and policy makers