Research On Service Quality Management Of Non-profit Oriented Business Incubator From A Synergetic Perspective

Under the guidance of national strategy of promoting independent innovation and constructing an innovative country, business incubators (Bis), with 26 years of rapid development, whose number is the second largest after the United States, have served the largest areas and firms in the world. Data has shown that BIs have substantially increased the survivability of new firms and speeded up the process of technique commercialization. Therefore, it has become an effective institutional arrangement and organizational innovation for nurturing new technology-based firms to survive and grow sustainably.Despite the contributions made by BIs in China, problems also emerge in several aspects, such as its imbalance development in western and eastern China, limited service provided, lacking of modern service consciousness and management capability. In terms of these, this dissertation focuses on how to assess and analyze the service quality and performance of BIs, and coming up with explicit theory, management tools and process for managing the service quality of BIs.This dissertation is a micro-level managerial behavior research. In the light of BI’s uniqueness in China, especially the bottleneck in less developed western area, case studies are employed to research the non-profit oriented BIs. More specifically, from the perspective of synergetic management between BIs and their clients, the process of BI service quality establishment and its performance are analyzed through thorough investigation and a combination with public governance and business management theories.The first part of this dissertation gives a brief introduction to the research background, meaning, objects, method, perspective and content. BIs and their service quality research are introduced through literature review, where the supporting theories and tools for this dissertation are refined. Further, it reveals that current researches concentrate on the measurement of input and output of BIs, lacking of researching the service providing process and the consequential quality assessment. This finding steers the dissertation towards originality.Following the literature review, a holistic research framework is designed, including hypothesis and approach. The research framework is consisted of three sections:Section one evaluates and analyzes the service satisfaction and service performance through questionnaires to 88 BIs’clients. Eight managers of the clients and one manager of BI are interviewed in section two. The qualitative results derived from the interview and the data generated from the aforementioned investigation constitute an integrated supporting chain, testing the hypothesis through the assumed approach. The results confirm that synergy between incubator and its clients is positively correlated to the service performance of the incubator, whereas the results do not suggest a positive correlation between synergy and service satisfaction of incubator. In section three, the basic characteristics and patterns of BIs are summarized. In addition, the fundamental conditions for synergy, synergetic effects and operational principles are stated. Correspondingly, a service quality analyzing framework, assessing and analyzing tools, and improving procedure for BIs’ service quality control are presented. In the end, generalized service quality management theories further verify that the findings of this dissertation can be widely applied.This dissertation is also an extended research to BIs’ service quality management. It clarifies the prerequisite, necessary institutional guarantee, supporting system of BI service quality improvement. The findings can shed light for local governments to launch incubator related polices in developing areas and indicate the positive influence of building a service-oriented government on enhancing BIs’ service management level.To sum up, improving service quality of BIs is essential for realizing service-oriented government. It is also the only road leading to sustainable development of BI itself. Centered on BIs’ service quality management, the dissertation proceeds with case study scrupulously and scientifically, obtaining the expected result finally. Theoretical originalities include:(1) breakthrough to the limitation of implementing service quality within single organization and exploring the service quality management of BIs under synergetic collaboration among multi-organizations in non-bureaucratic system; (2) proposing BI service quality management theory in the perspective of synergy; (3) decomposing organizational characteristics and quality management process of BIs’ service; (4) probing into the meaning of synergy between BIs and their clients; (5) extensive research to managing BIs’ service quality in the field of public organizations and public governance. Practically, the research findings can be applied to evaluate satisfaction level and service performance of similar service-oriented organizations. They also can be used for exploring the pathway of optimizing service programs and improving service quality, laying foundations for governments and managers of incubators to make decisions.