Urban environments are accelerating their transformation towards cleaner, friendlier places able to respect and use resources more efficiently. Across Europe, cities are blending social innovation, engineering and ICT excellence and smart technologies to help reach these goals. IRIS is at the forefront of this change and announce itself as the newest addition to the European Commission Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) lighthouse projects. The project has been developed around three lighthouse cities - Utrecht (The Netherlands, coordinator), Nice (France), and Gothenburg (Sweden) - who will work as collaborators and test-beds for follower cities Vaasa (Finland), Alexandroupolis (Greece), Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Spain) and Focsani (Romania). Each city will draw upon a mix of universities and research organisations, local authorities, innovation agencies and private expertise to accelerate entire communities to adopt ambitious energy, mobility and ICT initiatives.

• dr. ir. Ioannis Lampropoulos
• prof. dr. Wilfried van Sark
• dr. Joost Vervoort
• dr. Friedemann Polzin
• Jip Leendertse MSc

There is an increasing attention to business incubation and acceleration programs. These programs aim to prepare start-ups to become viable enterprises and change agents. It is however, not clear what the precise added value of these incubators is and their impact on the start-ups. This research evaluates the effectiveness of such incubation programs by posing the following research question: What is the impact of incubation programs on the performance and networks of incubated entrepreneurs, in comparison to non-incubated entrepreneurs?

We compare the performance of entrepreneurs that followed an incubation program with those that did not. Previous research in strategic management and incubator literature showed that abilities to build up, maintain and effectively use a network are crucial to the success of new ventures. Most incubation programs train network skills and provide entrepreneurs with access to a network of knowledge institutes, companies, providers of capital, legal advisors, or other organizations. This study tests the influence of network in and around incubators on the performance of the start-up.

The research question is answered using qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods consist of document analysis and interviews conducted with incubator managers and entrepreneurs. The first goal is to develop a typology for the different incubation programs. Such programs are diverse and a classification is required to allow systematic comparison. Further, the interviews can give qualitative insights in how start-ups develop after leaving the incubator, compared to those that were never incubated. Finally, through the interviews, understandings in the development of indicators for relevant network measures. These are needed for quantitative data collection