Incubators: A Realist's Guide to the World's New Business Accelerators

The first global incubators-environments that allow startup businesses to gather momentum and existing businesses to accelerate their growth-have let their fledglings fly solo. This fascinating new area of business is explored in Colin Barrow's Incubators, an in-depth analysis of the positive and negative aspects of the incubator phenomenon. Using his own hands-on experience at Cranfield Creates, an e-business incubator affiliated with Cranfield School of Management, the author provides a critical overview of the current global incubator space. Relying on real-life case studies, he provides insights on how entrepreneurs can get the best, and occasionally the worst, out of being in an incubator. He also provides authoritative guidance on what sort of options are available-like which type of incubator you should choose, or whether to incubate at all-along with coverage of less formal business incubators.

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All Customer Reviews
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Is incubation right for you?, 2005-06-16
While there is no single model for business incubators, in most cases the concept goes beyond the simple provision of a shared office or workspace facility for small business clients. The hallmark of any effective business incubator programme should be its focus on the added value that it brings to small business 'tenants' in terms of strengthened business skills; access to business services; improved operating environment; an opportunities for business networking, etc. to nurture early-stage small businesses, increasing their prospect for business survival and growth, compared with the situation outside the incubator.

In this book, Colin Barrow, the Head of the Enterprise Group at Cranfeild University School of Management, and Director of the Business Growth and Development Programme in the UK, gives very deep analysis of business incubators and gives the large list of incubators throughout the globe. The main questions of these book are "how business incubators work and does it work at all", "why there is a need for incubators", "what is the history of incubators and where we are now", "who goes in for incubation", "is incubation right for you", "how long should a tenant stay inside the incubator", and so on.

The case studies in this book are mostly based on e-business and software companies. I would also have recommended his book "How to Survive E-Business Downturn" in addition to this book.

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