The rapidly growing and diversifying incubator population has led to increasing efforts to understand why entrepreneurs prefer one incubator over another. Scientific studies suggest that entrepreneurs should prefer incubators that provide startups with intangible resources, such as business knowledge or networks to enhance performance. Yet, studies show many entrepreneurs prefer incubators that provide tangible resources, such as funding and office space. The heterogeneity in preferences for resources from incubators is poorly understood. We do not know whether there are patterns in this heterogeneity nor what factors explain this heterogeneity. Thereby, we do not know the extent to which a one-size-fits-all model of incubation is sufficient to attract and support startups or whether incubators need to tailor themselves to the perceived resource needs of different groups of startups. Hence, this paper aims to identify and explain the heterogeneity in preferences for resources offered by an incubator to startups. We conducted a discrete choice experiment to determine how the attributes of an incubator influence incubator choice by different latent classes of entrepreneurs. The data comes from 935 entrepreneurs in North America and Western Europe. Our results reveal three latent classes of entrepreneurs: "ambitious, balanced spinoffs," who consider all the incubator's attributes when making a decision; "innovation-driven funding seekers," who base their choice on funding availability; and "self-made individualists," who disfavor networking, training, and coaching. The ambitious, balanced spinoffs class based their choice on the attributes highlighted in the literature, while the innovationdriven funding seekers and self-made individualists fit more with empirically observed preferences for tangible resources. The classes show that systematic heterogeneity exists in the preferences for resources provided by an incubator. We advise incubator managers how to better tailor their support to the preferences and needs of classes of startups.

The development of start-up communities is seen as critical to the successful development of entrepreneurship in a region. However, it remains unclear what exactly start-up communities are and how they can be facilitated. Ambiguity concerning the geographical scale and membership of start-up communities leads to different conceptualisations. In this paper, we apply communities of practice (CoP) theory to understand how conceptualisations of start-up communities work and how they can be facilitated. To this end, we qualitatively study start-up communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. Our results show that start-up communities that are confined to a particular workspace strongly resemble a CoP. Furthermore, many elements of CoPs can also be found in regional start-up communities. Finally, we find that workspace communities have more direct and top-down facilitation activities, while regional start-up communities have more indirect and bottom-up facilitation activities.

Incubators are a prominent way to support technology based start-ups. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these incubators enhance start-up performance, nor is it known through which mechanisms this would occur. In this paper we test two mechanisms to explain the relationship between incubation and the amount of investments raised by early stage start-ups as performance measure. The 'hit maker' mechanism refers to beneficial effects of the direct transfer of resources and organizational or business knowledge from the incubator to the start-up. The 'network broker' mechanism refers to the benefits that start-ups enjoy from being connected to external funding sources through the incubator's networks. We test which of these mechanisms contribute to the performance of early stage start-ups. Our data comes from a unique survey from 935 entrepreneurs with early-stage technology based start-ups in Western Europe and North America. We find that incubators have a positive effect on (1) the amount of funding that start-ups attract and (2) the ability of start-ups to attract funding from formal investors and banks. Moreover, our results provide evidence for the network broker mechanism, but not for the hit maker mechanism.

This paper studies the role and effects of user-producer interaction (UPI) in the production of Web sites. The results of two empirical studies, one from a producer perspective and one from a user perspective, are presented. It is concluded that using UPI in the development of informative Web sites for a large public is a risky process, because it is hard to identify and define the most targeted users and their particular needs. The implications of these results are discussed.

As a major source of employment and innovation, start-ups play an important role across all industries (Bravo-Biosca and Westlake 2009; Brown and Mason 2014). However, over the past three decades, startups have been particularly instrumental in driving innovation and growth in the software (SW) and life sciences (LS) industries (Casper et al. 1999;Cincera and Veugelers 2013). The low capital requirements and short development times of the SW industry create a favorable environment for start-ups to enter the market and rapidly grow into successful companies (Nowak and Grantham 2000; The Economist 2014). Consequently,