Enterprise Development: New Research on the Performance of Incubators

Policy makers have increasingly turned to incubators as a strategy to increase the success of new enterprises. But there has been little consensus on how best to evaluate the performance of organizations and programs designed to support the successful development of startups.

Chaffik Bakkali is pursuing research that he hopes will help change that. A Ph.D. candidate in management science at Montpellier 1 University in France, Bakkali developed an evaluation tool that will make it possible to evaluate the characteristics of business incubators. He will attempt to test and validate this evaluation tool in the Canadian context, during a three-month research stay at the Telfer School under the supervision of Professor Martine Spence, April – June 2012.

Efforts to define relevant performance indicators have had mixed results. Previous studies have also had too great a tendency to examine the performances of business incubators from a single point of view.

In order to go beyond this, Bakkali is using a novel approach based on a scorecard of demonstrably relevant criteria. His contribution lies in the multi-dimensional nature of the evaluation model proposed.

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Last updated: April 30, 2012