The impact of the services of an incubator on the tenants' development

This book focused on the impact of the provided services of a business incubator on the development of its tenants. A single-case study design with embedded units of analysis was used, with a business incubator in Greece serving as the case study. The shared space and resources, the business support services and the access to the networks were identified as the main shared provided services of business incubators, while activity-based models containing gestation activities were used to capture the development of the tenants during their incubation period. Documents, interviews and direct observation were used as sources of data for the empirical part of the study. The tenants of the incubator and certain selected individuals closely related to the operations of the incubator formed the research sample, where the latter were used to validate the data obtained by the entrepreneurs about whether and how the incubator contributed to the completion of the gestation activities. The two data sets were analyzed in two different ways, providing a more holistic answer to the main research question. These were the analysis per startup and the analysis per activity.