Entrepreneurs' perceptions towards university incubation programmes: a qualitative study of the experiences of tenant entrepreneurs in the UK university business incubators

The focus of this doctoral research is to explore tenant entrepreneurs’ experiences and perspectives towards UBIs in the UK. In doing so, this study investigates the business incubation process from the perspective of tenant entrepreneurs and employs entrepreneurial learning theory. Contrary to previous studies that have adopted output-oriented approach to assess the effectiveness of business incubation programmes, this study has chosen a process-oriented approach. An extensive review of the existing literature revealed that incubatees’ perspectives have been overlooked in the literature. This study takes an incubatee-centred approach and sheds light on entrepreneurs’ experiences of establishing start-ups in UBIs, identifies challenges faced by the entrepreneurs and provides recommendations to the UK business incubation industry for improving the current business incubation programmes.

This study followed an interpretivist-inductive approach and utilised a qualitative research design. In order to collect the data, fourteen entrepreneurs from the UK UBI sector were interviewed with each interview lasting between forty-five to one hour and fifteen minutes. A manual thematic analysis of the collected data revealed that nascent entrepreneurs greatly benefited from the services and resources provided by UBIs; managerial assistance and cohort participation were regarded as major contributors to the tenant entrepreneurs’ learning, whilst access to financial resources, university resources, office space and access to networking opportunities also contributed to entrepreneurs’ productive incubation experience. The lack of industry-specific information and personalised support was regarded as the main challenge. Few respondents also reported concerns such as incubator’s bias towards alumni start-ups and favouritism in terms of additional support, hidden motives of external stakeholders, entrepreneurs’ struggles to feel included, risk-averse culture, and entrepreneurs’ financial struggle during the R&D stage.

The findings of this research make significant contributions to the literature by conceptualising the challenges faced by entrepreneurs while participating in UBI and by making contributions to the Entrepreneurial Learning Theory. Study findings support different approaches of ELT, namely experiential, situated, cognitive- affective and collaborative learning. The study also makes significant contributions to the professional practice by providing recommendations for improving the current UK business incubation programmes, such as enhanced academics’ involvement in incubator activities, equal support and opportunities for all tenant entrepreneurs, peer collaborations, training opportunities for incubator managers, effective mentorship, small and industry specific cohorts, informal networking opportunities and financial incentives for the entrepreneurs during the
research phase.