Heliyon (Jul 2024)
Accelerating entrepreneurship: Evidence from the incubation centers of management institutes of Dakshina Kannada
Abstract
Purpose: Incubation centres are gaining significant prominence as they play a crucial role in providing supportive environment and encouraging entrepreneurship among students. Considering its importance, the study is intended to offer a thorough knowledge of incubators’ role in promoting entrepreneurship growth using data acquired from Dakshina Kannada Management Institutes. It also intends to investigate the efficacy and success of incubators using a variety of metrics. Methods: This study is based on the mixed-method approach, where specifically the concurrent qual-quant approach is adopted. An in-depth interview was undertaken, and a structured questionnaire was formulated to collect the data from final year Masters’ students from the Management Institutes. Qualitative analysis was narrated and quantitative analysis was carried out using SPSS 26 and AMOS 23, with descriptive statistics, t-test, regression analysis, and SEM which were utilized to evaluate the association between variables. Results: The study has highlighted the importance of reputation and credibility of the incubation centre, along with the significance of building a strong network as integral factors for learning from it. Overall, the study has found that students’ perception of education collaboration, and policy regulatory framework pertaining to incubation centres highly impacted the effectiveness of the incubation centre, which further enhances its success. Implications: This study helps to handle challenges for young entrepreneurs through proper direction and support, by refining their business ideas and collaborations with local and regional businesses to create a healthy entrepreneurship environment by fostering the integration between government bodies, financial institutions, and venture capitalists with the entrepreneurs and key stakeholders. Originality/rationale: As an exceptional highlight than other studies, this study focused on assessing the impact of awareness, perception, education and collaboration, policy and regulatory frameworks, and challenges on the effectiveness of incubators, and success of incubation centre. This has provided the answers to more comprehensive questions pertaining to incubation centre using mixed method approach. The combination of qualitative and quantitative results has identified novel findings which urges the incubation centres to identify the startups with high growth potential where the major challenges lie in convincing the students to implement their own business ideas.
