Resumen de University business incubators: mechanisms to transform ideas into businesses
María Redondo, Carmen Camarero Izquierdo
Universities have created university business incubators (UBIs) in order to foster technology transfer and entrepreneurship. In fact, novice entrepreneurs who graduate from university think and act based on their university education and experience. In general, they have either no idea or only a vague idea about businesses and the market. Thus, incubation in UBIs is a business support process undertaken with a view to meeting the needs of emerging entrepreneurs, developing their business ideas and transforming the latter into viable and sustainable activities. In this specific context, the current work analyses the characteristics of the incubators and the type of resources and services provided to incubatees in an attempt to ascertain whether UBIs are efficient mechanisms for transforming ideas into businesses. In order to achieve this objective, we collected data from 93 incubation programmes from Spanish and Dutch universities through questionnaires addressed to their respective managers. The results show the situation of UBIs as well as differences in the occupancy and graduation rates in different programmes.
