Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal European Edition

The purpose of this paper is to describe two successful programs, SMIL (Sweden) and Spinno (Finland) that have been developed to support the start-up, growth, and consolidation of small technology-based firms. Over the years, it has been recognized that the physical facility alone, combined with institutional embeddedness, does not guarantee success. Active hands-on development programs and other such activities are required to complement the physical setting, in order to successfully support small technology-based firms. As the emphasis of infrastructural support arrangements is shifting from configuration orientation to process and development orientation, new approaches are required for the analysis, identification, and diffusion of successful practices. The new emphasis on processes calls for more dynamic research methods to complement the rather static, configuration oriented ones. Through a comparison of the two models, the paper identifies and discusses context-specific good practices and more universally applicable good practices.