Comparative Performance Evaluation of Selected Technology Incubators in Iran

Business incubators are recognized as important tools for promoting entrepreneurship development and wealth creation through supporting small and medium knowledge-based enterprises. This study aims at developing a framework for evaluating the incubators’ performance on four major dimensions, namely infrastructure, management and staff practices, business services, and outputs. To test the proposed model by using a correlational research method as a quantitative research, an author-made questionnaire (with reliability coefficient of 0.9343) surveyed opinions of 101 respondents from 7 incubators selected from all active technology incubators in Iran. SEM tests confirmed overall goodness of fit of the model and hypotheses tests showed significant differences in the range of incubators, performance. It is suggested that benchmarking, networking with universities, public and private institutions, and a holistic approach to incubation may improve incubators’ performance.