Technology business incubators (TBIs): a perspective for the emerging economies

Abstract

Technology and entrepreneurship are often reckoned to be the twin-horses pulling national economies towards their developmental destinations. Technology based enterprises (TBEs) are specially attractive to policy-makers because of their higher potential for job creation and wealth-generation through business growth as well as their lower disappearance rates compared to non-technology based firms. As new technologies are often developed in R and D institutions, it was such institutions in the Western nations that first took the initiative of providing incubation facilities to transfer these new technologies to the market. The model was later used by public and private agencies for facilitating technology development for new ventures. Such initiatives are now known by the common name of Technology Business Incubators (TBIs), some of which are focused on technology transfer and others on technology development for new ventures. Though TBIs are generally considered to be a major facilitator of TBEs, the experience of their effectiveness has been mixed, especially in the emerging economies' context. It is against the background of such diversity of experiences that we have undertaken a comprehensive review of the literature on TBI performance. Our findings suggest that, while in the developed countries technology development drives the incubator movement, the process is reversed in developing countries, where the incubator movement is trying to push technology development forward. For this reason the success of TBIs in developing countries would depend largely on the public support available for them.