Search for detailing the contents and the structures of variables for evaluating the performance of business incubators

Abstract

The main investigation goal of this research is a model that has been conceived and is being structured with the purpose of becoming a management tool applicable to several aims: in the support of incubators managers, for allowing the identification of structural, administrative or operational bottlenecks and problems; in the support of incubator planning processes; as an information source for incubator maintaining institutions, allowing the follow-up of their performance evolution; as an information source for governmental and academic agents, providing epistemic elements for any kind of studies concerning the performance of incubators.The conception of the model guarantees sufficient flexibility so that it may be applicable to any kind of incubators - technological, traditional, social and popular ones, specialized, sectorialized and others. The research has been carried out since 2005, with financial support by the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation - FAPESP, with three research grants and five scientific initiation scholarships. The initial goal was to build and detail a set of development indicators of mixed business incubators. The evolution of this original purpose to the current stage, of building a parameterized model, capable not only of assessing the development of generic incubators - this fact alone representing a enlargement of the reach of the project - but also of contributing to improve the management of incubators, may be considered as an effect of the own research advance process. The development level reached by the research allows pointing out, to whom we petition support hereby, the following main goals for a subsequent stage: a) assess the adherence of the detailed variables to the purposes of verifying the development standards of different types of incubators and of identifying the respective fragilities through empirical tests - in vitro, in the analogy - along with a sample to be intentionally selected from among the universe of Brazilian incubators; b) verify, simultaneously to the performance of the said empirical tests, the possible existence of new variables which may have been overseen or disguised; c) build a mathematical model contemplating the internal makeup of the indicators reflected on analytical expression formats relating internal (independent) variables to the indicators (each one a dependent variable). Each of these indicators shall constitute, as a dependent variable, a compound function, whose result shall express, as last resort, the final development of a generic incubator.