Business incubators and accelerators: a co-citation
analysis-based, systematic literature review
J. Piet Hausberg
1
•
Sabrina Korreck
2
Published online: 29 January 2018
The Author(s) 2018. This article is an open access publication
Abstract A long and rich research tradition exists on the phenomenon of business incu-
bators since this kind of venture support institution first emerged. One can observe an
increasing heterogeneity of incubation beyond the traditional mainstream focus on regional
development and university-based incubators. In the last decade, in particular the phe-
nomenon of accelerators as a particular form of incubators received increasing research
interest. A few literature reviews started summarizing the field, but left some important
issues unanswered. This systematic review study contributes to this effort deriving current
themes and a research agenda. We find that open innovation and social capital theory
increasingly complement the resource-based view as frameworks to understand business
incubation. Moreover, the phenomenon of private corporate incubators and accelerators
gains traction, both in entrepreneurship theory and practice.
Keywords Business incubators Accelerators Technology incubators New
technology based firms Systematic review
JEL Classification L26 O25 O32
& J. Piet Hausberg
piet.hausberg@uni-osnabrueck.de
Sabrina Korreck
Sabrina.Korreck@wiso.uni-hamburg.de
1
School of Business Administration and Economics, Osnabru
¨
ck University, Rolandstr. 8, 29/206,
49078 Osnabru
¨
ck, Germany
2
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 9,
B531, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
123
J Technol Transf (2020) 45:151–176
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-018-9651-y
1 Introduction
The concept of business incubation experienced a considerable evolution and division into
several similar institutions and approaches (Mian et al.
2016). After the first private
incubator was established in New York in 1959 (Lewis
2001) and the first public incubator
in Philadelphia in 1964 (Campbell and Allen 1987), business incubation diffused slowly
during the 1960s and 1970s (Hackett and Dilts
2004). By now, incubators have become an
integral part of the modern entrepreneurial ecosystem, supporting the growth of new
ventures based on a broad range of measures. In fact, we saw the emergence of so many
different forms of entrepreneurship support and even more names for them that the result
was a significant degree of confusion regarding the terms incubator and accelerator and
their delineation from and relation to connected concepts. A result of the evolution of the
incubator industry, the forking of its development paths and experimentation with new
incubator business models, is that no universal definition has crystallized and that both
practitioners and scholars often use similar concepts synonymously.
While there is a considerable history of research on incubators, literature appears to
remain fragmented and incubators have long been studied mostly as a peculiar phe-
nomenon in a variety of closely related research streams, above all urban and economic
development and university-industry technology transfer. Only recently, research focusing
primarily on the phenomenon of business incubators themselves gained traction. We
identified a few recent bibliometric and review studies regarding the field of business
incubation in general (Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano
2016; Hackett and Dilts 2004;
Mian et al.
2016; Phan et al. 2005) and one such study regarding university incubators in
particular (McAdam et al.
2006). Each provides some important insights into and over-
views of the topic, but at the same time leaves some equally important questions unad-
dressed. Probably the first review of the literature on business incubation is that of
Campbell and Allen (
1987). At the time, the phenomenon of incubators was very recent
and hence the research field only embryonic. Consequently, there was little need for the
review to be very systematic; it still succeeded to provide an in-depth summary of the very
few books and articles available.
Most recently, Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano (
2016) carried out a bibliometric
analysis and provide us with insights on the most productive authors, the development of
the number of publications over time, the geographical distribution of research in the field,
the journals with the most publications and received citations, as well as the type and area
of research. However, while undoubtedly useful, bibliometric analyses and their metrics
can—if not supplemented by an in-depth review—provide only a first glance at the status
quo of the field. Hence, we learn little about theoretical frameworks used or new concepts
introduced. Mian et al. (
2016), introducing to their special issue on business incubation,
provided the most recent literature review. They show a growing interest in the topic and
point to the phenomenon of accelerators as a newly emerging, relevant phenomenon for
which only very limited research exists.
A more comprehensive study is the systematic literature review by Hackett and Dilts
(
2004) in this journal. In their careful review, they provide a very good overview of the
development of the field in terms of the incubator definitions and configurations, the key
findings regarding incubation process and impact, and the challenges that the literature
stream faced at the time. However, this review dates back over a decade and we clearly
witness the emergence of new empirical phenomena and theoretical developments.
This overview of extant review studies shows that reviews either are at least a dozen
years old or are limited to bibliometric analyses. Therefore, our systematic literature
152 J. P. Hausberg, S. Korreck
123
review aims at pursuing four distinct goals. First, we seek to show the recently consoli-
dating research field regarding business incubators in the network of the most relevant
adjacent fields and topics. Second, we intend to derive a most reconcilable definition of the
concept of business incubators. Third, we aim at summarizing the state-of-the-art research.
Fourth and finally, we pursue the overall goal to conclude the implied persistent research
gaps in order to suggest a research agenda.
In the following section, we describe our research design before we present the results
of our bibliometric analyses in the subsequent section. After that, the main part of the
review covers definitions and typologies of incubators, their processes, as well as research
on their performance and impact. From this, we derive research gaps before we conclude
with an outlook on future research.
2 Research design
In our study, we carried out a systematic literature review that provides a bibliometric and
co-citation analysis, similar to the review of entrepreneurship research in general carried
out by Schildt et al. (
2006). Before we started the actual systematic review, we scanned and
read some of the most salient articles in the field in order to determine the search term.
Then we used the ISI Web of Science (WoS) database to find all literature on the topic that
could be of interest. When using the ‘topic’ field to search the database, ISI-WoS returns
all articles with the search terms in their title, keywords, or abstracts. Scholars in man-
agement science consider this database the most comprehensive and use it frequently in
systematic reviews (Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano
2016; Dahlander and Gann 2010;
Mian et al.
2016). However, although the ISI-WoS database is one of the most compre-
hensive scientific journal databases, it is not exhaustive. The sample could therefore miss
some important contributions. Moreover, we decided to focus on the most high-ranking
journals (see Fig.
1). This also means that the initial sample for the co-citation analysis
does not include books, although some provide relevant contributions. However, most of
these are included later because relevant papers cite most of the relevant papers and books
initially not included and hence they appear at least once in our sample.
Our broad search term was as follows: \‘‘incubat*’’ OR ‘‘business accelerat*’’ OR
‘‘technology accelerat*’’ OR ‘‘company builder*’’ OR ‘‘technology cent*’’ OR ‘‘innova-
tion cent*’’[. We included the terms company builder and technology/innovation center,
because we wanted to reduce the probability to miss relevant literature due to a too limited
search. We used the asterisks in order to retrieve results for similar versions and alterations
of the terms, like incubation and incubators. We decided not to search for ‘‘accelerat*’’
without business or technology, because this search turned out to deliver a huge number of
false positives even in the most pertinent journals, for example, when high-dynamic
business environments are investigated and a factor ‘‘accelerates’’ business processes.
We combined the search terms with the constraint that it has to appear in one of the
following WoS-categories: management, business, economics, operations research, man-
agement science, or urban studies. By this restriction, we could exclude more than 240,000
items from other disciplines such as health care, engineering, or physics. Based on this
initial macro-filter, the WoS database returned 601 results. In the second step, we screened
the journals for which the search returned at least one article and restricted the search to the
journals that could contain relevant articles, which led to a sample comprising 353 articles.
In the third step, we screened all returned articles of journals that were not amongst the
Business incubators and accelerators: a co-citation… 153
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02040
TECHNOVATION
J o ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Int J o TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT
J o TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
R&D MANAGEMENT
RESEARCH POLICY
TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING & SOCIAL…
J o BUSINESS VENTURING
J o BUSINESS RESEARCH
J o PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
URBAN STUDIES
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND REGIONAL…
INTERNATIONAL SMALL BUSINESS JOURNAL
TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS STRATEGIC…
ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY AND PRACTICE
J o SMALL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMICS
INNOVATION MANAGEMENT POLICY…
CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
MIS QUARTERLY
ORGANIZATION
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION…
J o MANAGEMENT STUDIES
LONG RANGE PLANNING
BUSINESS HORIZONS
Int ENTREPRENEURSHIP & MANAGEMENT J
J o WORLD BUSINESS
ORGANIZATION STUDIES
Fig. 1 Number of publications in our sample/Journal
y = 0.8723x - 2.6874
R² = 0.8862
0
5
10
15
20
25
Fig. 2 3-year smoothed
publication count and
corresponding polynomial
trendline
154 J. P. Hausberg, S. Korreck
123
obviously most relevant journals in order to identify false positive results. Following this
screening, we could restrict our journal list even further and ended up with a final sample
size of 347. On this sample, we performed the bibliometric analysis discussed in the next
section (Figs. 2, 3 and (Table 1).
3 Overview of bibliometric and co-citation analysis results
Using the freeware online tool hammer.nailsproject.org we conducted a bibliometric
analysis and obtained the co-citation node-edge-files. Afterwards, we imported the data to
the Gephi 0.9.2 software for the co-citation analysis and visualization of the co-citation
network. The assumption behind co-citation analyses is that with an increasing number of
shared citations the probability increases that focal papers share a specialized language and
specific worldview (Boyack and Klavans
2010). This allows us to conclude that co-citation
Fig. 3 Research by country (more than one country/article possible)
Table 1 Citation statistics
Sum of the times cited 22,286
Sum of times cited without self-citations: 21,046
Citing articles 17,254
Citing articles without self-citations: 16,963
Average citations per item 27.72
h-index 73
Business incubators and accelerators: a co-citation… 155
123