Business incubators nurture the development of entrepreneurial companies, helping them survive and grow during the start-up period, when they are most vulnerable. These programs provide their client companies with business support services and resources tailored to young firms. The most common goals of incubation programs are creating jobs in a community, enhancing a community’s entrepreneurial climate, retaining businesses in a community, building or accelerating growth in a local industry, and diversifying local economies.

No. The term “business incubator” gained popularity in the media with the explosion and subsequent demise of so-called Internet incubators between 1999 and 2001, but the business incubation model traces its beginnings to the late 1950s.

Incubators help client companies secure capital in a number of ways:

• Managing in-house and revolving loan and microloan funds
• Connecting companies with angel investors (high-net-worth individual investors)
• Working with companies to perfect venture capital presentations and connect them to venture capitalists
• Assisting companies in applying for loans

Research parks (sometimes called science parks or technology parks) are property-based ventures consisting of research and development facilities for technology- and science-based companies. Research parks often promote community economic development and technology transfer. T hey tend to be larger-scale projects than business incubators, often spanning many acres or miles. Research parks house everything from corporate, government, and university labs to big and small companies. Unlike business incubators, research parks do not offer comprehensive programs of business assistance. However, an important component of some research parks is a business incubator focused on early-stage companies.

The U.S. Small Business Administration administers the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) program to provide general business assistance to current and prospective small business owners. SBDCs (and similar programs) differ from business incubators in that they do not specifically target early-stage companies; they serve small businesses at any stage of development. Some business incubators partner and share management with SBDCs to avoid duplicating business assistance services in a region.

People sometimes use the term business accelerator as another term for business incubator in an attempt to differentiate themselves in the market. During the dot-com boom that occurred around 2000, numerous terms like “accelerator” emerged to describe business incubation programs. In the current market, many of these terms have fallen away, but accelerator remains a relatively popular term to describe business incubation programs.

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