Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Business incubation has variously been described as a support programme that assist the early-stage entrepreneurs to develop and stay on their own. Chandra and Fealey (2009), defined incubator as an environment that encourages the creation and development of new businesses, especially those with innovative and intensive intellectual content. Furthermore, business incubation programme has been acknowledged as an economic development tool most countries globally adopted (Al-Mubaraki, Muhammad, Busler, Ahmed, & Ahmed, 2015; Salem, 2014). The fundamental idea behind the business incubator is to offer fledgling businesses with series of resources and services associated with establishing the businesses (Al-Mubaraki & Busler, 2013). In determining the performance of incubation programme, especially in the developing countries, governments’ attitudes towards incubation contribute a very significant function for the reason that incubators in developing countries are typically financed by government. Studies have shown that business incubation programme has grown progressively significant within both developed and emerging nations. Furthermore, in the industrialized nations, incubators are primarily driven in the direction of high technological innovation businesses. Another highlight is the existence of a robust linkage among invention, academes as well as business incubators.
Despite the positive affirmation of business incubation, there is lack of studies related to its performance such that it is argued whether the programme is effective or not. As a result, there is a questionable evidence on incubation performance in the developing countries, especially, Nigeria. Furthermore, ever since the business incubation initiative was established in 1993, the programme seemed to have failed to live up to anticipations. For this reasons, this study looks into the salient role of government policy towards incubation performance in Nigeria. This will be done by employing a quantitative research approach whereby surveying stakeholders (incubatees) who are directly involved in the day-to-day incubation activities will be surveyed. This study provides a conceptualisation of business support, infrastructure, financial resources, networking, incubator governance as well as government policy, and joins those constructs using the resource based view (RBV) and institutional theory as supporting theories as depicted in Figure 1. Despite many studies that have investigated various factors that influence Incubator performance, most of them were conducted mainly in Asia, United States of America (USA), Australia and Europe while paying less attention to the African continent, particularly in Nigeria. Hence, Incubator Performance deserves further investigation in Nigeria because the findings of the previous studies may not be generalisable to the Nigerian context due to cultural and contextual differences.