Business incubation as a community of practice: an emergent cultural web

Abstract

Research on business incubation has been dominated by studies exploring university-industry technology transfer and high technology accelerators. Less is known about Business Incubation Centres (BICs), specifically, how their formal and informal structures may impact upon client development. Drawing on concepts from the community of practice (CoP) literature and organizational culture, we explore if BICs can be considered to be CoPs. We also seek to unravel the key elements which underpin the culture of a BIC and how these elements may provide enabling or constraining conditions for a CoP to emerge. Through a qualitative methodology of regional based BICs in Ireland, we illustrate how the amount of time spent on campus; the nature of the working week; the scalability of the enterprise; and the capacity of the enterprise to meet the criteria associated with high potential start-ups influences clients' perceptions of the value of BICs. We provide new theoretical insights which suggest that BICs are a CoP with a culture that can be studied, captured, and illustrated. Practical and policy implications are suggested to enhance the effectiveness of BICs for both clients and regions.

Sustainability in family business settings: a strategic entrepreneurship perspective

“…The design of the interview schedule (appendix) was guided by the model proposed by Kraus et al (2011). The dimensions of the model were used as "a priori" constructs (Anderson et al, 2019;de Oliveira et al, 2019;Ferreira and Fernandes, 2017;Stephens and Miller, 2022) in order to probe if approaches sustainability in entrepreneurship align with the principles of strategic entrepreneurship. We also adopted a critical incident approach to encourage and this allowed us to elicit a sequence of events from narrative accounts (Van de Ven and Engleman, 2004;Bott and Tourish, 2016;Yin and Campbell, 2018).…”

“…The emergent themes are then presented as a new model (see, Figure 2). This approach has been used previously by (Stephens and Miller, 2022;Altman et al, 2023;Walsh et al, 2023) and is an alternative to presenting cross-case themes in tabular form.…”

Innovation hub a venture for students’ entrepreneurial talents: a case of college of business education

“…The models for establishing college-based innovation hub are not far from other models (Macchi, Rizzo & Ramaciotti, 2014;Soetanto & Jack, 2018) as students will be exposed to new attractive venture for tangible entrepreneurial and business opportunities. The articulated aspects for consideration of the college incubation model is ascertained on the provision of basic business support services, facilities, free meeting space for tenant start-up teams to communicate; collaborate; innovate; create linkages with experienced entrepreneurs; other college based start-up teams for exchanging knowledge, experiences, contacts, and resources (Cooke, 2017); professionals specialized in intellectual property, financing, strategic and managerial issues (Blok, Thijssen & Pascucci, 2017;Stephens & Miller, 2022).…”