Moving away from a recipe approach to collaborative and flexible incubation
People tend to associate incubators with coffee machines, printers and ping pong tables and often overlook the relational and intangible factors behind business incubation. While, these kinds of structural elements enable the replication of incubators, standardized solutions have been criticized for not being adaptive enough to local contexts. We studied how stakeholders build and reshape an incubator to be adaptive and meet the changing needs of its members. For our ethnographic study, published in the journal Small Business and Economics, we participated for four months in an incubator for social entrepreneurs. This helped us understand the details of the social practices that were central to the creation of an adaptive and collaborative incubator.
The foundations of participation, flexibility, trust and reciprocity in an incubator
We found that entrepreneurs and incubator management perform four social practices – onboarding, gathering, lunching, and feedbacking – in which they try to find a sweet spot between entrepreneurial freedom and structured support. First, there’s onboarding – the initiation ritual that gets new members on the same page about the rules, values, and how things work around the incubator to foster participation. Second, incubator members and management come together to make shared decisions through formal gathering practice. This practice enables the incubator to flexibly adapt their services to the needs of their members. The third practice, lunching, is more than just grabbing a bite; it builds trust and fosters serendipitous encounters. And last, there’s feedbacking, where there is a purposeful co-creation of ideas, and a healthy give-and-take among members of the incubator is maintained (for a detailed description of the four practices, have a look at our full study). In other words, these social practices serve a range of purposes and have implications far beyond their surface meaning. They are foundational to the intangible, yet invaluable factors of a functional community: participation, flexibility, trust and reciprocity.
Finding the right balance
These social practices allow for multiple people involved in the incubator, from novice and expert entrepreneurs, to management and stakeholders, to shape and reshape an incubator. Ultimately, this helps keep the incubator aligned with members’ unexpected and changing needs and expectations. Each practice brings a balance between bottom-up needs and top-down structure. For example, in the onboarding practice, incubator management attempts to socialize newcomers into the incubator, but also provide space for entrepreneurs to share their stories and connect with the community. While in the gathering practice, entrepreneurs are given more agency to reshape formal support elements of the incubator. We suggest that this serves the function of preventing the incubator from being perceived as too rigid and formulaic. It’s all about finding the right balance, where the structure isn’t too strict and the freedom isn’t too wild.
Experimenting with social practices and reflecting on them
While the social practices work well for the incubator we studied, we don’t advise incubators to copy the social practices we’ve described in our study. On the contrary, we warn against the copying of practices developed elsewhere as practices need to be developed in context and in interaction with the people (their needs and desires) and the material world that are part of that context. It is important to experiment with different practices, and reflect on their effectiveness for creating desired outcomes such as participation, flexibility, trust and reciprocity. Furthermore, we hope to inspire incubators to reflect on the balance between bottom-up needs and desires and top-down structures, rather than copy them from a Silicon Valley context. We hope that this will help them to move towards a desired balance where entrepreneurs experience enough structured support, while having enough freedom to adapt the incubator to their specific and evolving needs.
