| Business incubators are public-, private-, and university-sponsored business assistance organizations whose purpose is to support the development and growth of new enterprises through the provision of a variety of services. The increase in incubators during the past decade coupled with the public policy question regarding the benefits of such intervention mechanisms have spawned a body of research to better understand the impact of incubators. Many of these research efforts have been descriptive or anecdotal and have generally lacked a comparative framework to assess the significance of the impact of incubators.;The purpose of this research is to perform a comparative empirical analysis of the impact of business incubators on small, high-technology firms using an entrepreneurial network paradigm. Entrepreneurial network theory suggests that strength, complexity and diversity of business relationships influence newly-found firm performance, resulting in improvement of the longer term chances of firm survival and growth. We propose a set of exploratory research questions and hypotheses, comparing incubator and non-incubator firms with respect to a set of defined entrepreneurial networks.;To test our hypotheses, statistical comparisons of entrepreneurial network variables are performed between a sample of high technology incubator firms (interest group) and a sample of comparable non-incubator firms (control group). To ensure comparability between groups, a set of criteria is used for firms to be included in our samples. Selected variables span customers, suppliers, board of directors, trade organizations, financial sources, partnerships, and external business experts. The data was collected via a pilot-tested survey which was mailed to random samples of 284 incubator firms and 383 non-incubator firms in the United States with valid response rates of 25% (n = 61) and 23% (n = 80), respectively.;The results suggest that business incubators influence only a subset of examined networks and do not appear to enhance a broad range of entrepreneurial networks needed for better firm performance. The analysis also confirms prior research findings that firm performance is improved by certain types of entrepreneurial networks. Implications for practitioners and stakeholders are discussed. |
