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Corporate Incubators: Industrial R&D and What Universities can Learn from them

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Abstract

The explosive growth of incubation has seen a concurrent and significant increase in research on and knowledge of the incubation phenomenon. However, instead of comprehensively differentiating between non-profit and for-profit incubators, research has described a whole array of partly overlapping archetypes, thus missing out on important aspects. This article first offers two arguments validating a framework of what non-profit university incubators can learn from for-profit corporate incubators before presenting the framework itself. While corporate incubators are for-profit organizations with which to enhance a corporation’s technology development, university incubators try to leverage technological insights from the university in a similar manner. In accordance with their respective missions, organizational structures, incubator processes and resource flows, it is possible to transfer lessons learned from two corporate incubator archetypes—the fast-profit incubator and leveraging incubator—to the world of university incubator. Our empirical findings are based on in-depth case studies of 25 companies through 52 semi-structured interviews with managers of corporate incubators of large technology-intensive corporations in Europe and the U.S., two EU incubator benchmarking surveys and five interviews with the heads of technology transfer offices of two top technology universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Consultant at McKinsey & Company, Munich, Germany

    Barbara Becker

  2. Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen, Dufourtstrasse 40a, CH-9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Oliver Gassmann

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  1. Barbara Becker
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  2. Oliver Gassmann
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Correspondence to Barbara Becker.

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Becker, B., Gassmann, O. Corporate Incubators: Industrial R&D and What Universities can Learn from them. J Technol Transfer 31, 469–483 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-0008-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-0008-6

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