The impact of different types of incubators/accelerators on the Italian entrepreneurial ecosystem

A Business Incubator is defined as an organisation that actively supports the process of creating and developing new innovative businesses through a series of services and resources offered both directly and through a network of partners. In Italy, in recent years, the business incubators have assumed a key role in improving technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The main objective of this work is to update the work of the Social Innovation Monitor (2018) and to carry out differential analyses between the results achieved by Italian incubators in 2018 and those of 2017. Furthermore, it is proposed to map the incubators listed on the Italian territory. Moreover, the performance of the Italian start-ups incubated during 2018 was analysed and their results compared with those of 2017. To this end, the necessary information for the analysis was collected by sending a questionnaire between July and November 2019 to all Italian incubators. The work is structured as follows: initially the characteristics and the various types of business incubators are presented, examining in depth the services offered and the benefits generated by them. Subsequently is provided a description of the Italian reality and the evolution of the incubator concept in Italy over the years. The analysis of the literature are followed by a description of the methodology used for the research: the updating of the list of incubators and the database and the main steps that characterized the creation of the questionnaire for data collection. Afterwards, the results of the research are presented through the following analyses: analysis of the population of Italian incubators and analysis of incubated start-ups. This work is concluded summarizing the results of the analysis and including limitations and possible future developments.