Pre-incubation and support method for student entrepreneurship: engineering action research in the Ubee Lab incubator

Abstract

This research contributes to the field of entrepreneurship support by providing knowledge on pre-incubation. Pre-incubation remains to be defined in particular by considering the lack of empirical work. Our work is based on the pre-incubator of the University of Bordeaux, Ubee Lab, which supports student-entrepreneurs with the twofold objective of helping their projects to gain in maturity and to make them more convincing. The head of Ubee Lab expressed the problem of the lack of a method built around the now widespread concept of Business Model. More precisely, the method, in addition to pursuing the two previous objectives, had to encourage the commitment of the students by sequencing the progress of their projects. The method also had to be formalised in order to be integrated by future new employees of Ubee Lab, this type of structure experiencing a high turnover. In this way, the method professionalizes the employees of the pre-incubator and contributes to their recognition in the ecosystem of entrepreneurial support. This action-research is thus of engineering significance by providing a method expected by the actors in the field and by drawing elements from it which contributes to better understand pre-incubation. This building of knowledge seems necessary for entrepreneurial support ecosystems and entrepreneurial education ecosystems since the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation encourages universities to, among other things, support students with an entrepreneurial project.