The Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) of Incubators, Accelerators, and Co-working Spaces

Abstract

The concept of entrepreneurial orientation is widely accepted to be a significant theory in the literature on firm-level entrepreneurship. Despite the collectivity of research, which continues to demonstrate that entrepreneurship and EO differ in nature greatly and according to context, too often, context is ignored. To address this gap, this paper explores the differences in the EO of different types of organizational contexts that provide business support to entrepreneurs such as incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces. Analytical results highlight variations in EO by business support facilities related to their organizational context and the subdimension of EO considered. Combined these results highlight the need for discriminating amongst different dimensions when examining EO, as well as the need for some new indicators or measurements of each dimension.