Business incubator contributions to the development of businesses in the early stages of the business life-cycle

Abstract

This study investigated 157 business owners perceptions as to the importance of four value-added contributions to the development of their businesses through the early stages of their life-cycles. Literature suggested these value-added contributions to be: shared office services, business assistance, access to finance and business networks. The purpose of this research is to help business incubator managers solve the problem of how to allocate limited resources, in the form of value-added contributions, to multiple tenant businesses at different stages of growth. To do this an electronic questionnaire was used with a set of multiple choice questions that established the stage of growth that each business was in, and a constant sum exercise determined the perceived importance to each respondent of each of the four value-added contributions. Of the five early stages of growth proposed in the literature, these being existence, survival, growth, expansion and resource maturity, only four were represented in the data. Non-parametric tests for significance at a 95% confidence level showed that no significant difference existed in the perceived importance of any of the value-added contributions across stages of growth, however a clear indication of the relative importance of each value-added contribution within each stage of growth was identified.