Our research focuses on the influence of the selected projects’ characteristics on coaching and incubator performance. Incubators need to choose the candidates that best meet their objectives and, at the same time, they have to select companies whose potential has not yet been developed. We studied 177 companies hosted in French incubators. Our findings emphasize the difficulty for economic performance variables, such as job creation, to account for the action of the incubator in the long term. Indeed, the incubator may be tempted to select companies that allow it to meet short term objectives thereby reducing its potential added value.