E-Magazine
Innovation and Entrepreneurship through International Business Incubation
Peter Harman
International business incubation is a well-tested, 50-year-old systematic and global approach primarily aimed at growth-oriented start-up enterprises with the potential to grow through the efficient use of business resources. The aim is to help create sustainable and competitive companies. Additionally, in recent years, Business Incubation has also begun to add value to more established enterprises that need to change.
Internationally, business incubation is an essential development process for enabling innovation and entrepreneurship and it comes in all shapes and sizes. The process can have diverse objectives, including:
• commercialising ideas and research
• generating employment
• empowering the poor
• regenerating and revitalising communities
• encouraging and supporting innovation
• creating export revenues
• encouraging young graduates to create their own businesses
• developing new industry sectors
• increasing competitiveness of an existing sector
Sometimes aimed at technologically, socially and/or economically vulnerable individuals and their ideas, true business incubation adds real and measurable value to citizens, communities, regional and national economies by increasing the survival rate of new and fledgling enterprises, accelerating their growth, enhancing their competitiveness, creating wealth and sustainable high-value jobs and increasing the tax base.
Business incubation depends on a continuous relationship between the business incubation environment and the start-up entrepreneur leading to a point of sufficient maturity and ‘graduation’. It is recognised globally by governments, practitioners and other stakeholders as a subtle, complex and fit-for-purpose process to support innovators and/or entrepreneurs through the early stages of their development and growth. It is designed to facilitate the creation of wealth and actively contribute to the sustainable socioeconomic development of communities both in established and emerging economies.
By bringing together like-minded innovators and entrepreneurs for a finite period (often in a physical environment) and concentrating and applying resources and support according to the needs of the new enterprise, and the needs of the wider environment in which they operate, survival rates are dramatically increased, individuals and innovations are motivated and aspirations raised.
Business Incubation brings together behaviours, philosophies and activities and concentrates its efforts in a knowledge-rich, risky and entrepreneurial environment while reconciling competition and collaboration in a nurturing and developmental environment.
As noted above, globally, business incubation as a concept and a philosophy is not new. The gathering together of individuals and mentoring of their ideas in an informal nurturing environment has brought about many good and sometimes global enterprises throughout history. However, the increasing pace of global, environmental and social change has necessitated more scale and much greater acceleration and concentration of effort and resources to meet the fast-moving global challenges of the 21st Century. Changes to, and within, established and emerging economies require a new and more concentrated process of business incubation that is mindfully proactive and formalised in order to ensure that knowledge accumulated from around the world is exploited for individual, community, national and global socioeconomic and environmental benefit.
In addition to the immediate benefits that have been proven in the first few decades of business incubation (initially in the established economies), there are wider impacts that have been observed and recorded, notably, in the emerging economies. This “ripple effect” should not be underestimated and, where it is recognised and harnessed provides a multiplier effect far beyond the immediate socioeconomic gain.
The components of and the rich ’cocktail’ that is true business incubation are well documented across the members of the burgeoning international business incubation community represented by the Global Business Incubation Network (GBIN). There are now over 60 national association and regional network members of GBIN across the globe, representing many thousands of business incubation environments worldwide whose total client base exceeds 250,000 enterprises.
Peter Harman, Chief Executive, UKBI, www.ukbi.co.uk
