Entrepreneurship and Social Capital: Evidence from a Colombian Business Incubator

Abstract

This paper contributes to the important body of research on entrepreneurship and social capital. Most previous work on social capital and business incubators has analyzed how the structure of personal networks (measured by network size or density) and their quality (measured by tie strength) influence venture performance. However, few studies have focused on the mobilization of partners’ resources. This paper analyses how these three dimensions of social capital —defined in this article as the structural dimension, the relational dimension and the resource dimension— are closely linked to the three types of interactions in a business incubator: networking, counseling and resourcing. An Ordinary Least Squares regression was applied to a sample made up of incubating firms in Colombia. Results from the data analysis show that resourcing interactions constitute the most significant aspect of business incubators for entrepreneurs.

Keywords

• Entrepreneurship
• business incubator
• social capital
• Colombia