Abstract
Entrepreneurship is at the heart of sustainable, organic growth for
most developed, as well as transitioning and developing economies
and incubators have often served as catalysts and even accelerators
of entrepreneurial clusters formation and growth.Our premise is that
this may be more so in less developed economies where incubators
can help bridge knowledge, digital, socio-political and even cultural
divides and help increase the availability, awareness, accessibility
and affordability of financial, human, intellectual, and even social
capital, the key ingredients of entrepreneurial success.Incubation
has recently experienced increased attention as a model of start-up
facilitation. Venture capitalists see incubators as a means to diversify
risky investment portfolios, while would-be entrepreneurs approach
incubators for start-up support. Incubators are faced with the challenge
and the opportunity of managing both investment risks, as well as
entrepreneurial risks. As an indication of their usefulness, more
than a thousand incubators have been established in the last few
years based on a number of different incubation business models (not-for-profit,
for-profit, public/private entity, etc.), which we categorize in
five incubator archetypes: the university incubator, the independent
commercial incubator, the regional business incubator, the company-internal
incubator, and the virtual incubator.In this paper, we propose an
overarching incubator model that synthesizes elements and best practices
emanating from the five archetypes empirically identified and also
incorporates substantially higher economies of scale and scope, as
well as global and local (gloCal) knowledge arbitrage potential.
This paper presents an architectural blueprint for designing a gloCal,
real and virtual network of incubators (G-RVIN) as a knowledge and
innovation infra-structure and infra-technology which would link
entrepreneurs and micro-entrepreneurs with local, regional, and global
networks of customers, suppliers and complementors and thus help
not only bridge, but also leverage, the diverse divides (digital,
knowledge, cultural, socio-political, etc.).The implications of this
archetype of new ventures incubation for facilitating both venture
business activity and broad-based economic development are discussed
and early findings from pilot projects in central and eastern Europe
are discussed.
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