Incubator performance
In the field of entrepreneurship studies, research on incubators is in full expansion. Scholars are increasingly interested in these structures because of their key role in entrepreneurial success, and they have particularly focused on the issue of evaluating incubator performance. Reliable tools for evaluation are a pressing need in today’s context of limited public resources, and local governments, which provide most of the funding, are thus all the more insistent on efficiency. Nevertheless, the research on this topic to date has not yet yielded an evaluation model that has been fully satisfactory. Our review of the literature indeed indicates that previous works have tended to assess incubator performance from a single perspective only. In contrast, we propose a new multidimensional model based on the balanced scorecard, which has a clear advantage over earlier models : the many facets of incubator performance can be evaluated to give a global picture of efficiency. In addition to presenting the model, however, we also empirically validate its utility through a quantitative study based on the responses of 109 French incubator managers to an online questionnaire. From a theoretical perspective, this empirical validation shows the interest of aggregating several performance indicators into a single evaluation model. From a management perspective, both funding sources and incubator managers have a new tool at their disposal for evaluating and guiding performance while taking into account the great complexity of the incubation process.