Towards a Resource-based View of Corporate Incubators

Corporate incubators for technology development are a recent phenomenon whose functioning and implications are not yet well understood. The resource-based view can offer an explanatory model on how corporate incubators function as specialised corporate units that hatch new businesses. While tangible resources, such as the financial, physical and even explicit knowledge flow, are all visible, and therefore easy to measure, intangible resources such as tacit knowledge and branding flow are harder to detect and localise. Managing the resource flow requires the initial allocation of resources to the corporate incubator during its set-up as well as a continuous resource flow to the technology venture and, during the harvest phase, also from it. Two levels of analysis need to be distinguished: (1) the resource flow between the corporate incubator and the technology venture and (2) the resource flow interface between the corporate incubator and the technology venture. Our empirical findings are based on two phases: First, in-depth case studies of 22 companies through 47 semi-structured interviews that were conducted with managers of large technology-intensive corporations’ corporate incubators in Europe and the U.S., and second, an analysis of the European Commission’s benchmarking survey of 77 incubators.