How the incubator Managers Act as the Niche Manager? Empirical Evidence from China

Although the importance of the incubator mangers for successful incubation has been widely discussed, there is little evidence on how the incubator mangers leverage various resources contributing to incubation success. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by employing the niche manger theory to investigate the extent to which the incubator managers act as the niche manager in the incubator context. More specifically, an evaluation is made to explore the influences of expectations, networks, and learning constructed by the incubator managers on the incubation performance. Using data on the 189 national technology business incubators (NTBIs) from 2008 to 2012 in China, we find that the role of networks constructed by the incubator mangers in stimulating the survival of new ventures is not as significant as the roles of expectations and learning construction. More specifically, the venture capital obtained from private organizations performs better than the incubation fund which is mainly obtained from governments. While the internal network building has a great positive impact on incubation performance, the external network tends to act as “bad networks”. Finally, the incubator managers are always not sufficient to offer technology broke support in Chinese NTBIs.