Managerial recommendations
Based on the results and the information derived during the course of this work, the author had gotten closely acquainted with the field of study and the processes involved in business incubation and the entrepreneurial high-technology companies‟ knowledge acquisition from the business incubator. This knowledge helped the author to develop a list of recommendations for the management of business incubator, which might help increase the effectiveness of knowledge transferring processes inside the organization, thus providing more effective development process for entrepreneurial firms.
As it turned out during the study, one of the main issues faced by the firms is a necessity to switch often between different consultants, while searching for the right type of knowledge during at different stages of the firm lifespan. Most of the interviewed business incubator consultants were pointing out this characteristic of their knowledge being “deeply-spread”
whereas an entrepreneurial company requests wider range of knowledge flows, covering more extensive amount of knowledge areas. Thus, the recommendation would be to define a specific set of knowledge areas covered by each of the consultants, according to one‟s preferences, as well as objective tendencies towards knowledge area due to previous working experience, undergone training, or other objective factors.
The author assumes this would lead to a lesser extent of fluctuations of companies inside of the business incubator in a search of proper knowledge agents, resources, and networking possibilities. More precise business incubator residents‟ dispersion among the consultants could lead to an overall higher survival rates among the firms due to savings of time, money, and human resources.
Another recommendation is that incubatees could be integrated into some kind of knowledge clusters, in accordance to their age, maturity, business needs, and the development stage. Each of the clusters can be
undergoing similar educational activities, in accordance with the most urgent needs of the companies forming it. One, or a very limited number of consultants, should be assigned to this type of a cluster, in order to reduce the total amount of man-hours spent per by each of the consultants per each resident. This will again, allow for more targeted knowledge transfer to the entrepreneurial companies, and, as a possible side effect, will increase network effect inside a cluster. This is effect is being found inside the business incubator as a whole, which is discussed in the study above.
There is a possibility of it appearing inside the clusters as well, which would accelerate all the knowledge processes, both sharing and learning.
The next recommendation is based on the ideas of the business incubator management, which were announced during the interviews conducted.
The ideas were later on supported also by the companies‟ representatives.
The core of it is to develop a more standardized program of an entrepreneurial company development, throughout the course of incubation period. According to the this program newcoming residents would be thoroughly assessed at the very first stage of incubation, with different criteria proposed, which would provide an overview of the condition of the company. This proposition is based on an assumption of that each of the business incubator residents could be comprehensively assessed and categorized rather accurately in order to fall under certain project boundaries. This might help to develop specialized programs for different categories of the business incubator residents, which would decrease the amount of time spent by consultant on average, and thus, create capability for a business incubator to scale and be able to provide services for larger numbers of residents with less costs.
Limitations and recommendations for future research
The boundaries of the study and the research were rather clearly defined, in the research setting part, with all the reasoning provided. Nevertheless, the author of the paper sees some limitations which he believes are important to point out.
First of all, every knowledge engineering project has some level of uncertainty, as it involves much interpretation of different people‟s opinions and ways of representing thought. Moreover, even trying to stay an independent analyst, author imposes his own interpretation of the received results. Thus, the outcomes could be somewhat biased and representing one person‟s point of view on issues. For the future research the author suggests trying to involve more people in the research process, especially during the stage of interviewing and opinion interpreting.
Secondly, the case company itself (business incubator “Ingria”) to the moment of the study being conducted is rather a young company, with less than 3 years operating experience. On one hand, this partially made the research itself possible, but on the other hand, there is definitely a need for a further research conducted for the same company when it steps into the next stage of development.
All of the interviews from the third set were conducted with the companies who succeeded, and have gained at least a six month operating experience inside the business incubator. Some information about the failed projects might be collected during further research, which might lead to adjustments of the knowledge model.
As the last direction of the possible further research the author proposes revising his managerial recommendations, given in the previous section. Researching the usefulness of the suggested recommendations would definitely be an essential outcome of the current research.
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