Between a Soft Landing and a Hard Place: How Silicon Valley Software and Life Sciences Business Incubators Facilitate Learning

Abstract

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,