Assessing business incubation: A review on benchmarking

Abstract

This paper studies benchmarking on Business Incubators (BIs), aggregating the state of knowledge about benchmarks for BI assessment. Based on 136 papers that evaluate BI performance, this study first investigates all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provided by 42 BI assessment studies and the relevant benchmarks for each KPI. The final benchmark list is created by taking seven of the most prominent benchmarking studies as a basis. With this framework, this research contributes to the literature on BI assessment by providing comprehensive and aggregated benchmarks for these important innovation habitats. A final list of 33 benchmarks is provided so that BI assessment, for which no common framework exists, becomes easier. This study suggests that with the difficulty of creating a common assessment framework for BIs, it is more reasonable to create a common benchmarking framework that accounts for regional and industrial differences. The results could be subject to a multiple criteria decision analysis. Our paper is the first to aggregate the diverse information on benchmarking and provide researchers and BI managers with a base list of benchmarks. Keywords: Business incubation, Performance evaluation, Benchmarks