Business incubation is a dynamic process of business enterprise development. Incubators nurture young firms, helping them to survive and grow during the start-up period. Among various types of incubators the university-based incubators are particularly studied. Although most university incubators are quite successful in terms of the success rate and the growth rate of tenant companies, their financial contributions to the sponsoring universities, however, are still not satisfied. It is found that behind the successful history records there are still some barriers impeding the development of an efficient incubator. In this research, a new model, which integrates merits of public and private incubators into the university incubator, is proposed for the betterment of its management scheme. The goal is to develop a successful incubator, which can earn profits not only for its own financial sustainability but also be able to generate income for the university. The outcomes of this research are summarized as follows: 1. From questionnaire survey around more than 100 university incubators around the world, this research received constructive opinions from incubator experts to support the proposed concept. This inspires the author to consider the necessity of a new incubation model for long-term sustainability. 2. The method of this survey study combines the Delphi Method and Scenario Analysis, called modified Delphi method, for worldwide survey and the Microsoft Excel method for data statistic for both of the Taiwan and worldwide surveys. By breaking down long questionnaire into two successive surveys, the replied rate did significantly increase. 3. An integrative framework for the new incubation model has been proposed for the sustainable operation of university incubator. National Taiwan University has validated this model in a similar way. 4. The process of privatization of university incubator is proposed to meet the university administrative procedure. Both of the government initialized top-down and incubator initialized bottom-up processes are considered. A Business Plan to suit for the proposed incubation company is also designed in this work. The sustainability in terms of financial status has been predicted based on some reasonable assumptions. 5. In order to verify the proposed model, three case studies through on-site visits have been carried out to compare their incubation systems and financial status up-to-date. This can provide a guideline to adjust the proposed model of this work. Finally, a comprehensive conclusion and discussions are given to summarize the contribution and future work of this research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/201932 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Hsiao, Yu-Chan Helen |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | EN-AUS |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Yu-Chan Helen Hsiao 2008 |
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