Incubating innovation: an analysis of the role of Italian incubators in 2021

Although Europe has a rich history of innovation and remains an innovative region, there is considerable potential to further improve its innovative capacity. In this context, incubators come in, intending to accelerate the process of creating new innovative enterprises. Numerous types of research indicate that they play a crucial role in promoting innovation, which is why governments and individuals use them as a tool to facilitate the growth and development of young high-tech companies. Promoting the creation of new firms that embrace innovation can foster higher productivity and thus more output for the same inputs. In the Italian context, several measures have been introduced in recent years to foster business development. The legislation introduced in Italy on startups, also with the help of the legislation on certified incubators, aims to promote sustainable growth and technological development. Although there are several analyses in the literature regarding incubators and their economic effects, there are few studies in Italy, and these mainly focus on the analysis of various incubation models. Against this backdrop, the Social Innovation Monitor (SIM), analyzes the main characteristics and performance of incubators and accelerators. The present thesis work is inspired by and aims to continue the mapping activity initiated by the SIM research team, contributing to the analysis of data for the year 2021 and to the drafting of the annual report published on the SIM website. After a brief introduction, four more chapters compose this thesis: the literature review chapter contains an analysis of the literature in which the different incubation models proposed by Grimaldi and Grandi (2005) are explored, and the role of a business incubator and its origins are explained. In this first section, a second classification proposed by Aernoudt (2004) is also reported and the themes of social incubators and open innovation are dealt with in detail. Furthermore, to better understand what will be done in the following parts of the thesis, some definitions relating to the different types of incubators have been studied. Finally, the European and finally Italian contexts are explored. The next chapter deals with the methodology used to carry out the analyses, which is the main topic addressed. The methodology followed is that proposed by the SIM team and for this reason, it is in line with the one used in past years. The last chapter reports the analyzes carried out through numbers and graphs obtained during the analysis process and proposes comments on the latter. Finally, the concluding part will report the conclusions, summarizing the results obtained in the analysis and highlighting the limitations of this research and the opportunity for further research in the field.