Social capital and business incubators performance: testing the structural model

Abstract

Social capital is considered as an important factor of innovativeness, organi-zational advantage and value creation. Although social capital has been widely studied in general, there is a lack of research investigating the role of social capital in relation to business incubators. Additionally, the literature still misses an alternative intangible view of incubators’ performance viewed from the perspective of the incubatees. Thus, this study contributes an insight into the social capital and networking exploitation of firms in incubators and evaluates the performance of incubators from the perspective of their incubatees. In specific, we investigate how do social network size, role models, individual experiences, and establishment of a firm as a result of incubator activities influence on proactive exploitation of social networks within incubators. The paper also shows how proactive exploitation of social networks influences on satisfaction with the incubator, and how satisfaction in turn influences on commitment to the incubator and trust in incubator. Data for testing the structural equation model were collected with a structured question-naire. For the analysis, 125 usable responses were obtained from small firms from Slov-enian incubators.