Among the main issues pointed out in the literature, much of the attention in the research has been related to impact evaluation of business incubation. Although the internal process is considered as a black box by several studies, the main components of incubation are already known. The focus of this work is an evaluation strategy of the first component - the selection process. The effectiveness of this stage was evaluated as the alignment between the incubator desired profile and the companies entrepreneurial orientation. Although innovativeness was perceived as the main characteristic, the survival-of-the-fittest strategy was more evident. The entrepreneurial orientation offers a set of relevant selection criteria because it expands the term weak-but-promise into better-defined concepts and relates to the existing incubation literature. Therefore, this analysis presents a more structured approach to effectiveness evaluation of selection process, opening the incubator black box. As future work, it is suggested to evaluate pre-incubation activities to verify their impact along with this approach
