An evaluation of the business support services rendered by university-based incubator

Abstract

Business incubation program has been established in Malaysia to help new businesses for almost two decades. Many developing countries including Malaysia advocates that business incubation with present of comprehensive support services will contribute to the economic growth of the country. However, appropriate support services that should be rendered by the incubator to their incubatees remain unclear especially in Malaysia. This raises a big problem when the expectations of the incubatees did not concomitant with the services provided by the incubator. Therefore, this research aims to examine more preferred support services, which the incubatees find useful and can contribute to the their success. Apart form that, researcher aims to critically examine the expectation gap between incubatee’s perceptions of importance of support services listed with the existence availability/quality of the support services that have been provided by incubator. Four main types of support services were examined to be most common support services which are resources provision, training program, consultancy and management services and network mediation. In order to answer the objective of this research, the result has been analyzed in detail by descriptive statistics, paired t-test, and gap index formula. Findings reveal that networking mediation holds a huge gap in between incubatee’s expectation and the services availability while training program, consultancy and management services and resources provision was recorded to have a smaller expectation gap. Researcher has suggested few recommendations at the end of this study and it is hoped that, general guidelines for the future incubator in formulating their business strategy could be proposed.