EVALUATION WITHOUT BIAS: A METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON PERFORMANCE MEASURES FOR BUSINESS INCUBATORS

Abstract

Business growth and formation are fundamental drivers of job crea-tion and economic growth. Business incubators provide a nurturing environment, through an array of business support resources and services, where entrepre-neurs, start-ups, and small businesses can commercially validate and transform their ideas and concepts into viable and tangible products and services. Despite growing attention to evaluate the performance and impact of business incuba-tors, the existing literature continues to suffer from methodological, theoretical, and empirical limitations. In particular, existing performance measures have inherent biases that lead them to underestimate the role of business incubators in entrepreneurship and economic development in economically distressed are-as, which typically face disadvantageous local economic conditions. The pur-pose of this paper is to explain the need for better performance measures and the difficulties in creating them.ECONOMICALLY DISTRESSED AREAS, BUSINESS START-UPS, BUSINESS INCUBATORS