Towards a taxonomy of services offered by start-up business incubators: insights from the Mediterranean region

Business incubation aims at stimulating entrepreneurship and nurturing ideas to transform them to viable ventures and drive economic growth. The paper defines a comprehensive framework that serves as a basis for the categorisation of all incubation services. The proposed taxonomy has been applied on ten Mediterranean university incubators. An indicative sample of five countries has been defined, focusing on university incubators as they bridge the innovation potential of research/academia communities with the real business world, underpinning a sustainable and robust entrepreneurship model. By mapping the sample with the categories of their services, we intended to investigate how they differentiate from other incubator types. It was concluded that university incubators fall shorter only in the provision of administrative services in relation to typical incubators. This framework shall be further used as a tool for policy makers supporting their resource allocation decisions and help internal stakeholders...