Organizational sponsorship and the economics of place: How regional urbanization and localization shape incubator outcomes

Organizational sponsorship and service co-development: A contingency view on service co-development directiveness of business incubators

“…Organizational sponsorship providers act as an intermediary between the environment and a start-up, trying to offer each sponsored company the necessary resources to survive in that environment (Amezcua et al, 2020;Dutt et al, 2016). A specific case in point is the incubator; a professional service provider (Aaboen, 2009) offering administrative services, logistic infrastructure, business coaching and networking to small start-ups, also called 'incubatees' (Bergek and Norrman, 2008).…”

“…What is more, even though sponsorship organizations thus prepare the start-up to survive in a business environment (Amezcua et al, 2020;Hackett and Dilts, 2008), it is the same environment that impacts the sponsorship organization's internal functioning by surrounding it by a stimulating or impeding institutional context for entrepreneurial activities (Mian et al, 2016;Phan et al, 2005). For example, in institutional contexts with high dispersion of entrepreneurship-related knowledge, a sponsorship organization can assume that most entrepreneurs know the basics of how to start a business.…”

“…As such, the sponsorship organization can focus on business proficiency in its service offering and does not need to set up incubation mechanisms to explain its basics. In other words, the sponsorship organization's institutional environment does not only impact the sponsored companies' ease of gaining external legitimacy (Amezcua et al, 2020), but also the sponsorship organization's internal functioning. In this paper, we follow this 'external environment-internal sponsorship organization' viewpoint, and plea for a contingency view to better understand both internal and external factors influencing a sponsorship organization's internal functioning.…”

“…General service development literature points to the importance of the service producer's human capital. Third, we acknowledge that to better understand an incubator's internal functioning, external influencers need to be considered as well (Amezcua et al, 2013, Amezcua et al, 2020, and specify how the external institutional environment in which the incubator operates impacts its development directiveness. Fourth and finally, further elaborating on this contingency view, we examine how internal (that is, the incubator's human capital) and external (that is, the institutional context) elements interact to impact the incubator's directiveness.…”

“…Then, because information exchange relationships can either be stimulated or obstructed by external institutional partners (Busenitz et al, 2000), we also includeas explainedexternal contingencies in our conceptual model. Indeed, as Amezcua et al (2020) portray, environmental influencers such as urbanization and localization impact organizational sponsorship. We open up these environmental influencers to the regulative, cognitive and normative environment, and argue that the broader institutional environment does not only impact the effects of organizational sponsorship (Amezcua et al, 2020), but also the incubator's internal functioning.…”