This guide is meant for those in the public and private sectors who realize that the incubation of new enterprises can no longer be left to chance.
Its purpose is to explain how to design and implement effective business incubation programs. Business incubation experts Lichtenstein and Lyons offer information that arose from a fundamental question: What practices have entrepreneurs and policymakers used successfully to incubate new enterprises? To answer this question, they detail how business incubation really works, by describing and analyzing more than 110 successful incubation practices, drawn from both the public and private sectors.
Together, these practices form a “playbook” of approaches that can be adopted or adapted by other programs. This guide also contains a conceptual framework–based on analysis by practitioners, not academics–that can help the reader understand how to use these practices to design effective incubation programs. Specifically, the framework will enable users to diagnose obstacles to entrepreneurship, design an action plan to help entrepreneurs overcome those obstacles, and deliver the assistance entrepreneurs need.
