Do Business Incubators Work?

Somewhat surprisingly, at least to me, there is remarkably little formal research on whether business incubators work. Matter of fact, most research seems to take their effectiveness as a given and then get into the academic taxonomy game of describing how incubators are structured.
That is baffling, given the collapse of the late-1990s incubator game, and given the number of incubators still being created. Has the lag-time to getting academic papers published stretched out to six years? Because my hunch has always been that incubators don’t work. Yes, there are some rare exceptions, but in general companies that succeed in incubation would have succeeded without incubation.
About the closest study I could find on-point was this one from a Case Western doctoral student. And as I suspected, his data shows that the evidence is ambivalent, at best, with respect to the efficacy of incubators. Matter of fact, the most significant benefits of incubators seem to come from reputational effects from incubator membership. In other words, so long as people think incubators are worth something (even if they really aren’t) they are willing to cut you a little extra slack for being a member.

Related posts:

1. Tenure & Parasitism at Harvard Business School
2. Business Week’s Brush with Blodget
3. Obstructonist Tactics from Business Schools
4. Pfeffer: “The End of Business Schools”
5. The Soft Market for Business Schools