Entrepreneurs’ perceptions of business incubator services

Resumo/Abstratc:

Business Incubators (BINC) play an important role in entrepreneurial ecosystems, providing relevant services to support the creation and growth of start-ups. BINC provide controlled conditions that favour the development of new companies and also lend credibility to start-up or emerging ventures. Nevertheless, sometimes there is a mismatch between the services provided by BINC and the entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the utility of the services, given the length of the incubation process. This study aims to address the gap noted in the literature and in empirical studies, i.e., to determine entrepreneurs’ perceptions and their importance to business incubation. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a literature review focused on the particularities of BINC, and second, to present an empirical study of Brazilian and Portuguese BINC, Brazil and Portugal being the two places where we designed profiles for entrepreneurs. This study also assesses entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the services provided during the different phases of the incubation process and provides a comparison between Brazil and Portugal. The entrepreneurs’ perceptions and profiles were assessed using a questionnaire sent to Brazilian and Portuguese entrepreneurs incubated in BINC situated in the urban regions of São Paulo state (Brazil) and Lisbon (Portugal). The results registered in the two countries were compared according to the stage of the incubation process (pre-incubation and incubation). The results suggest that entrepreneurs’ perceptions are connected with the requirements of each incubation phase for each firm and register some differences not only between traditional and technological BINC but also between the countries studied, mainly based on the type of services used by entrepreneurs in the different incubation phases.

Keywords: entrepreneurs, business incubation, perceptions

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