Business incubation process for design start-ups : case studies on government-based and university-based business incubators in Hong Kong

Fong, Tiffany W. M. (2022) Business incubation process for design start-ups : case studies on government-based and university-based business incubators in Hong Kong. Doctoral Thesis, 273pp.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

The importance of entrepreneurship in the past 20 years has been recognized as an economic driver to the first-world countries' Gross Domestic Profit (GDP) growth index. Many entrepreneurship programmes, including business incubators, accelerators, innovation hubs and co-working spaces were established in the past 20 years. Business incubator is one of the entrepreneurship programmes that was well established in the past 50 years worldwide. It provided hardware and software, including infrastructure, business services and funding support to entrepreneurs. Most of these business incubators mainly focused on technology start-ups. Considering the incubation process and service supplied by the incubator, previous studies were limited to the incubator's perspective and that of the incubatee was rarely included. This was the research gap to be filled by this study. In recent years, cultural and creative industries have played a crucial role in the economies of many countries, and so their entrepreneurship became a new topic in the field. However, there have been few studies on design and creative entrepreneurship. This is the main research gap identified in this research, specifically, 'there are no framework of business incubation process for design start-ups'. Based on the above research gaps, one main research question was defined: 'What is the business incubation process for design start-ups?' Following on from this, three sub-questions were developed. These sub-questions were: (SQ1):'What are the incubator's expectations and perspectives of their design incubatees and the programmes'; (SQ2):'What are the design incubatees' expectations and perspectives on their business incubators in terms of services and support'; and (SQ3): 'What are the key elements of business incubation process for design start-ups'. The first two sub-questions identify the differences of incubators and incubatees' perspectives in the business incubation process. And the third sub-question targets on the key themes of the business incubation process for design start-ups. Based on these research questions, the three objectives of this study were defined. These were (1) to establish an understanding of government-based and university-based incubation process for design start-ups; (2) to explore the business incubation process for design start-ups from two perspectives, these being, incubator and incubatees; and (3) to develop a framework of incubating design start-ups by incubator with a process-based view. To explore the answers to the research questions and achieve the objectives, a qualitative approach comprising multiple case studies was selected and applied in this research. Data from two perspectives, incubator and incubatee were collected to fill the previous research gap of the limited perspective based on incubator study. Two cases of business incubators in Hong Kong were explored. They were: Hong Kong Design Incubation Programme by Hong Kong Design Centre as a government-based incubator and HKPolyU Micro Fund as university-based incubator. To obtain a rich description of the cases, data were collected through multiple sources, including semi-structured interviews, site visits and documents. In the semi-structured interviews, representatives of both incubators and incubatees were interviewed. A total of thirty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Three incubation centres were visited. Data triangulation was applied to explore the individuals' perspectives in a business incubation process. All the collected data were sorted in a dataset. According to the literature review, six categories of the business incubation process were reported as the result of first code. It supplied a frame to guide the data collection and analysis. Since it was generated based on the previous studies, it also represented the incubator's perspectives and non-design start-ups. Based on the first codes, the researcher highlighted the quotations in data set and the transcriptions by using the software, ATLAS.ti. The second codes were generated as the result of the analysis. Through comparing second code of incubator's perspective in the two cases with the first code, the characteristics of business incubation for design start-up were reported. Through comparing incubatee's perspective of the second codes in the two cases, the opinions of business process from incubatees were identified. The second code results from the two perspectives in the two cases were further synthesized via cross-case analysis to obtain the first themes of the business incubation process. After comparing the first themes with the literature review, the final themes were reported. To validate the results, these findings were reviewed by a group of experts from academia and industry in the fields of business incubation. Overall, there are four main findings reported in this research. (1) six categories of business incubat...

This record has no associated files available for download.