The networked business incubator—leveraging entrepreneurial agency?

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new incubator model, the “networked incubator”, which is a hybrid form of the archetypal business incubator (BI), based on territorial synergy, relational symbiosis, and economies of scope. This paper looks at why this new model has emerged and what distinguishes it from the more traditional incubator model. The theoretical basis of the research is social capital theory. Empirically, the paper is based on 6 months of ethnographic data collected in one of the first known and documented networked incubators. The closing section of the paper addresses the implications for research and practitioners.