Business incubation: the case of the European Space Agency

We test a theoretical framework, based on four principles, that has been developed through a previous systematic literature review. The ‘laboratories’ that have been chosen in order to test the theoretical framework are the business incubators at the European Space Agency (ESA). The methodology is a multiple case study research of ESA’s business incubators. The reason why we have chosen them is that the same ESA’s successful business incubation programme is applied in different business incubators across different nations. That provides a unique empirical setting in which to test the internal and construction validity of our principles, neutralizing the influence of the hosting country. The final result is not a ‘statistical generalization’ regarding a population of business incubators, but an empirically, multiple case study based, ‘analytical generalization’ of the proposed theoretical framework. Such theoretical framework appears effective in explaining the success of ESA’s business incubation programme. The collected evidences also have practical implications as we expect the framework can be applied by policy makers approaching the business incubation tool and extended to non-profit, publicly funded business incubators – the overwhelming majority of operating business incubators – that might take advantage from aligning their development strategy to our proposed framework.