Towards studying the impact of business incubation on regional economic performance: a high-level overview and preliminary experiment

In this paper we present a preliminary study on the regional impact of business incubation in an ecosystem of knowledge-based firms. We seek an answer to the question, “can incubation of a subpopulation of firms result in an increase to the economic growth and performance of the entire region?” To answer this question we use a simple idea model of innovation ecosystems in which agents exist in a spatial environment, possess technologies that allow them to transform resources from one type to another, and where the population evolves to adapt to the current technological space. Evolutionary advances that introduce technologies novel to the population are interpreted as innovations. The dynamics of our model and its associated performance measures center around the flow of resources between individual agents at the micro level. Our early results suggest that business incubators can have a substantial impact regional economic performance, but only if the support provided by an incubator is tailored to the individual firms.