Critical Factors and Performance Measurement of Business Incubators: A Systematic Literature Review

Business incubators (BIs) are important supporters for young businesses, since they provide firms with physical facilities and intangible support. Existing literature reviews focusing on BIs have neglected to consider individual factors in their success in favor of combining key performance measurements to identify their development targets. This systematic literature review thus aimed to combine studies that examined specific issues pertaining to BI performance and related key performance indicators to measure their activities. We conducted a systematic literature review based on two research questions: the first research question concerned critical factors for BIs’ performance; the second concerned their performance measurements. To ensure that we covered crucial factors and indicators of the latest generation of BIs, our systematic procedure included 74 studies published between 2005 and 2020 that were read in full and revealed ten critical factors that particularly emphasized financial resources and networking. We identified six categories for performance measurement, placing the greatest emphasis on the measurement of social capital. We recommend that academic researchers and BIs prioritize the intangible factors that constitute organizations’ hidden value. This review thus provides novel findings by identifying common critical factors for BIs’ performance and offering guidelines for performance measurement that consider BIs’ intangible assets and trends for future studies.