Incubating Businesses

Abstract: The efficiency of business incubators is disputed, but they have attracted significant attention from policy-makers and are a part of economic policies worldwide. To ensure their efficiency, it has been suggested that more involvement in the ventures by the incubator management would be beneficial. The purpose of this thesis was to inquire into the relationship between entrepreneurial processes and managerial practices in business incubation. Drawing upon research about entrepreneurial processes and the management of entrepreneurship and creativity in other organizational contexts, the thesis problematizes the suggestions of increased managerial interventions in entrepreneurial processes in business incubation.The purpose was achieved through an analysis of entrepreneurial narratives from two Swedish incubators with different levels of managerial involvement in their ventures. The theoretical frame of reference used for the narrative analysis was based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts for studying varying possibilities and groundings for becoming in narratives. Entrepreneurship is understood as a creative process characterized by dialogue, polyphony and carnival, which has implications for our understanding of business incubation as a phenomenon.The narrative analysis generated four genres of entrepreneurial narratives and two models of incubation with different conceptualizations of entrepreneurship, the role of the incubator management and the incubation process. The result from the analysis of the incubator management from a creative process view was that the managerial approaches to coaching and clustering favored by the two incubators had different implications for entrepreneurship by providing varying possibilities for creativity due to aspects such as control, standardization and specialization. This study shows that business incubation, regardless of the model, includes a larger variety of entrepreneurial processes than previously recognized.This study contributes to our understanding of how managerial involvement in business incubation is conducted in practice and how it is understood from the entrepreneur’s perspective. The theoretical contribution of this study is a Bakhtinian framework, which allows us to observe and to understand business incubation differently. The study shows how the Bakhtinian concepts can be adapted and be made useful in studying the relationship between entrepreneurship and management in business incubation by emphasizing entrepreneurship as the product of social interaction.