Business Incubator Services and Benefits

The concept of business incubation to assist fledgling businesses to establish and to develop networks, management skills, and markets for their products or services is a relatively recent innovation. The origins are mainly overseas countries and the United States in particular. The research question addressed by this study is: What services offered by business incubators either in-house, or accessed by referral, are of benefit to small and medium enterprise (SME) owner-managers?
This paper provides an in-depth and Australian perspective about this issue, through six South Australian case studies of business incubators ‘with walls’ and virtual incubators ‘without walls’.