University business incubators and opportunities for collaboration with companies within the start-up 2

Abstract

Business incubators based on the university mainly target social impact by creating opportunities for job creation, and profit is not the primary objective. However, companies are doing business, and there should be strong reasons to attract them in collaboration with the university. This paper aims to find the possibilities for collaboration between university business incubators and companies. To achieve this purpose, we used the data from scientific articles. The review is based on the content analysis of the relevant papers in the three-level approach (individual, organisational and institutional). Similar to other entrepreneurship-supporting organisations, university business incubators connect start-ups with mature companies or industry leaders to allow faster growth for new ventures. This research illustrates that the most significant types of collaboration for all three levels (individual, organisational and institutional) are mentorship and networking. The suggestions of this paper give an overview of the incubation process to entrepreneurship researchers.

Keywords: Business incubator, entrepreneurship, networking, start-ups, university, university-industry collaboration;