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Research Article

Business incubators in Africa: a review of the literature

Abiodun Egbetokuna Leicester Castle Business School, Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom;b National Centre for Technology Management, Ile-Ife, NigeriaCorrespondence[email protected]
ORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2069-7648View further author information
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Received 08 Sep 2022, Accepted 11 Dec 2023, Published online: 19 Dec 2023

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews research on business incubators in Africa, as a policy tool for supporting entrepreneurial businesses. Combining bibliometric and narrative approaches, it identifies five themes in the literature: incubator types and support; incubator performance and innovation; incubator impact on businesses and economy; incubator role in start-ups; and incubator as enabler of learning. It also highlights gaps for future research, including the lack of studies on climate change and industrialization; the limited evidence on how to improve incubator support; the absence of studies on adaptive, responsive and inclusive incubators; and the scarcity of rigorous impact evaluations. The paper concludes that incubators are useful for enterprise development in Africa but need collective research and policy efforts to strengthen their contribution.

1. Introduction

The aim of this paper is to summarize the literature on business incubators in Africa, with a view to proposing a future research agenda. In developing countries, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) provide nearly 90% of all employment (Page and Söderbom Citation2015). On average, 60% of employment and 50% of GDP in African countries are generated by small firms (Endris and Kassegn Citation2022). MSMEs therefore represent a key part of the solution to unemployment and poverty problems. However, these enterprises exhibit low levels of survival and productivity (La Porta and Shleifer Citation2014). Business incubators are deployed as a vehicle for improving enterprise survival and growth (Adegbite Citation2001; Chandra and Chao Citation2015). As a policy option, business incubators form part of an innovation system and aim to support the survival, growth, innovativeness and productivity of enterprises that already have growth potential.

There are different types of incubators, including conventional business incubators, innovation hubs, science parks and accelerators. This paper focuses on the conventional business incubator (henceforth, incubator), which is essentially a brick-and-mortar shared facility for new and young firms. The facility offers business support services, networking opportunities in additional to cheap rental space (Markley and McNamara Citation1995). This type of incubators is attractive in the African context because it require relatively lower resources to establish and manage. They also generally incubate firms in the industrial and services sectors, where countries could build productive capacity and a competitive advantage for economic growth in the coming decades. They are therefore well suited as agents of private sector development and structural change in African countries.

The literature on incubators in Africa is growing but remains small relative to the global knowledge frontiers.Footnote1 Moreover, the literature is taking different directions. It is therefore critical to identify what we have learned so far, what evidence is inconclusive, and what we still do not know enough about. This study, therefore, aims to summarize the research on incubators in Africa and identify important gaps for future research. A focus on Africa is instructive. The continent accounts for nearly 20% of the world’s population (UN-DESA Citation2019a, Citation2019b) but a large share of the population lives in extreme poverty.Footnote2 Given the central role of the private sector in poverty reduction, it is useful to understand how to effectively support the survival and growth of private enterprises, beginning with an understanding of what works and what does not.

This paper combines bibliometric and narrative approaches to create a rigorous and transparent systematic literature review. Bibliometric analysis is established as a valuable tool for identifying both gaps in the existing literature and topics for future research because the data generation process is based on objective criteria and the analyses are based on well-tested quantitative techniques (Ye et al., Citation2020). The systematic review in this paper examines the current structure of incubator research in Africa regarding its major themes and intellectual foundations as well as a narrative discourse of some open questions for future research. It is worth noting that there are previous reviews of incubator research in developed and developed countries. However, because of the restrictiveness of the bibliographic databases used, they typically exclude studies on Africa (e.g. Hackett and Dilts Citation2004). Moreover, almost without exception, previous reviews focus on one or more narrowly defined topics (e.g. Aernoudt Citation2004; Akçomak Citation2011; Allen and McCluskey Citation1990). To the best of my knowledge, this paper represents the first systematic review of the incubator literature with an explicit focus on Africa. The rest of the paper contains a description of the research methods and a discussion of the findings before the paper concludes in a final section.

2. The concept and development benefits of business incubators

The academic and practitioner literatures identify several forms of interventions that are deployed to enhance business survival and growth in developing countries. These include interventions related to.

  1. direct funding (e.g. business grants and loans);

  2. capacity building (e.g. training on entrepreneurship, business management or the use of specific tools such as ICTs);

  3. market instruments (e.g. tax incentives, customs duties, and government procurement); and

  4. early stage protection (e.g. business incubation)

Of these, business incubation is particularly interesting because it could easily function as a platform for the implementation of other types of interventions. For instance, Markley and McNamara (Citation1995, 273) noted that business incubators act as a one-stop shop for access to ‘business assistance services, networking opportunities, and flexible, below-market rental space’.

In a broad sense, the term incubator is used to describe an organization that helps entrepreneurs to develop their business from ideation to the launching and early growth stages. This broad conceptualization includes a wide range of organizations ranging from large real estate locations like technopoles and science parks, to the smaller brick-and-mortar business incubators, accelerators and innovation hubs. It also includes incubators without walls, that is, organizations that act as aggregators of business support services (Adegbite Citation2001). In a strict sense, a business incubator differs from other types of incubators in that it provides business support and management services under one roof for entrepreneurs and new ventures (Akçomak Citation2011). For this study, therefore, we refer to business incubators as those organizations that ‘supply joint location, services, business support and networks to early-stage ventures’ (Bergek and Norman Citation2008, 22) whether or not these ventures are technological. In several African countries like Nigeria, incubators that focus on technological businesses are known as technology business incubators (Adelowo, Olaopa, and Siyanbola Citation2012).

The specific advantages of incubators are well-known. By design, incubators provide both tangible and intangible benefits to firms. The tangible benefits include physical space, superior infrastructure and capacity building opportunities. These tangibles are all linked to several intangible benefits such as lower operating costs, and access to a support network through which moral support, advice information can be obtained (Allen and McCluskey Citation1990; Lalkaka Citation2002). Akçomak (Citation2011) notes that incubators are a remedy for the disadvantages that small and new firms encounter by providing numerous business support services and they are useful in fostering technological innovation and industrial renewal. Evidence from studies across African countries stands in support of the foregoing benefits. In particular, this literature shows that despite management challenges, incubators have been helpful in supporting the survival and growth of SMEs especially (Adelowo, Olaopa, and Siyanbola Citation2012; Ganamotse et al. Citation2017; Siyanbola et al. Citation2012). The current paper sheds light on current themes and gaps in this literature, to create a seedbed for future research.

3. Methods

3.1. Sample selection

The systematic literature review follows the PRISMA protocol (Page et al. Citation2021). Search was conducted on November 02, 2020, on DimensionsFootnote3, a relatively new bibliographic database launched in 2018. The philosophy of Dimensions is to provide comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature (Herzog, Hook, and Konkiel Citation2020). This is particularly desirable for this study given the need to account for locally relevant research that may be missing from less comprehensive (even if well-known) data sources. That is not to say that Dimensions includes everything that other data sources exclude, but its broader coverage allows for a better representation of the scientific literature in under-researched areas. As Visser, van Eck, and Waltman (Citation2021, 38) note, ‘The ideal data source provides comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature … and in addition also offers a flexible set of filters for making selections of the literature’.

Dimensions is appealing for this study for three main reasons. First, it captures a wide range of research outputs including journal articles, proceedings, monographs, preprints and chapters. This makes it more inclusive than other well-known databases such as Web of Science and Scopus which have been previously critiqued for under-reporting research from Africa especially in the humanities and social sciences (Egbetokun et al. Citation2022). Second, apart from being larger than most, there is considerable overlap between Dimensions and other established data sources. In a recent detailed comparison, Visser, van Eck, and Waltman (Citation2021) reported 27 million documents in Scopus and 36 million in Dimensions. Of these, 21 million are common to both databases, which means that Dimensions contains most (78%) of what is included in Scopus and much more. Finally, it offers extensive flexibility in the processing of results. In addition to full-text search and abstract search, Dimensions offers dedicated filters for publication year, publication type, researchers, categories, open access, citation details and funding information. It also features an analytical view that provides, for instance, the total and average number of citations over the preceding 10 years to all items in the results list. The combination of its comprehensiveness, flexibility and overlap with other sources makes Dimensions an ideal data source for my analyses.

The process followed in selecting the studies finally included in this review is illustrated in . I used each of the keywords incubator and incubation combined with each of Africa’s countries and territories, including Western Sahara, Reunion and Swaziland to search in the title, keywords, abstract and full text of publications. I did not restrict the search by years because we know that business incubators in Africa are a relatively recent phenomenon and so is the associated research. The database search initially returned 7913 results. These were reduced to 127 when results were restricted to relevant disciplinary areasFootnote4 including Human Society; Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services; Business and Management; Economics; Built Environment and Design as well as Policy and Administration. The excluded fields include, inter alia, Biological Sciences, Medical and Health Sciences as well as Veterinary Sciences. With the help of a research assistant, I screened the titles and abstracts of each of the 127 remaining articles and eliminated another 79 that did not focus on business incubators, leaving 48 studies finally included in the review (see Table A1 in the Appendix for a full list). The studies eliminated at this stage include those that focus on unrelated topics (e.g. concrete processing and mobile applications development) but that belong to one or more of the included disciplinary areas and use one of the two main keywords at least once. For each of the 48 final studies, I stored the author(s), title, abstract, where published, year published, type of access and number of citations.

Figure 1. Workflow of the literature selection process.

Figure 1. Workflow of the literature selection process.

3.2. Data analysis

The data obtained from the search was processed using version 1.6.15 of VOSviewer, a free network analysis software (van Eck and Waltman Citation2020). Two distinct approaches – bibliometrics and critical narrative – were combined in the analyses. The bibliometric analysis proceeded as follows:

  1. Overview of incubator research in Africa: I describe the evolution of the literature in terms of publications per year and the outlets in which the research appears. I also summarize some citation indices, including the most cited papers and authors.

  2. Intellectual foundations based on co-citation analysis: A co-citation link connects two items that are both cited by the same document. For instance, in a set of three papers A, B and C, both A and B are connected by a co-citation link if C has referenced both of them. The network that results from all such connections gives us a view of the authors and intellectual traditions that have most influenced incubator research in Africa.

  3. Research themes based on citation analysis and bibliographic coupling.

    • Citation analysis: Two publications are connected by a citation link if either one cites the other. The citation network is the result of all such links. For the purpose of this study, the citation link is non-directional; in other words, a link is counted once between two papers A and B whether A cites B, B cites A or they both cite each other. This approach helps to simplify the analysis and allows focus on the connectedness of the research on incubators in Africa.

    • Bibliographic coupling: Two publications are said to be bibliographically coupled if they both cite a third publication. For instance, in a set of three papers A, B and C, both A and B are coupled if each of them made reference to C. There is thus a probability that A and B are related in terms of their subject matter. The bibliographic coupling network helps us to gain insight into the intellectual shape of incubator research in Africa to date. In combination, both the citation analysis and bibliographic coupling help to highlight research themes.

For the critical narrative, the author’s expert knowledge of the literature was applied to the findings from the bibliometric analysis to construct a narrative discussion of gaps in the literature and an agenda for future research.

4. Results and discussion

The results are organised into two parts. The first part concentrates on the bibliometric summary of the literature while the second part contains the narrative on research gaps and future research agenda.

4.1. Findings from bibliometric analysis

4.1.1. Overview of incubator research in Africa

shows the trend in the number of articles per year on the topic of business incubators in Africa. The early stages were shaky: the first article appeared in 1993 and it would be another eight years before the next article appeared in 2001, which was also followed by a seven-year gap. Articles did not start to appear annually until 2011, nearly two decades since the first paper. However, from a modest start with an average of 1.3 articles per year between 1993 and 2012, the African incubators literature experienced rapid growth that started in 2013. More than 80% of all the articles included in this study were published between 2013 and 2020, with an average of 5.7 articles per year. Following a slight dip in 2019, a total of nine articles were published in 2020, the highest in any given year. This shows that research on incubators in Africa is still in its early stages and quite small but is rapidly growing, having expanded by 800% in the 27 years between 1993 and 2020.

Figure 2. Number of studies per year.

Figure 2. Number of studies per year.

Most of the published research on incubators in Africa is in the form of journal articles (). Open access publications are particularly pronounced, gold open access articles being about half of all publications. This is interesting to note, considering the widely reported deficiency of research resources in sub-Saharan Africa especially in the social sciences (Egbetokun et al. Citation2022; Citation2020). A possible explanation for the large share of open access publications is that many authors in the sample are affiliated with institutions outside sub-Saharan Africa or in South Africa where support for research and publishing is comparatively better.

Table 1. Types of studies (n = 48).

contains data on the journal in which research papers on incubators in Africa have appeared. The data shows that most of the journals that have published on incubators feature only one article. Excluding book chapters, only six of the journals published more than one paper on incubators in Africa since 1993: one has three papers and the remaining five have two papers each, together accounting for over a quarter of all 48 papers included in this study. Table A2 in the Appendix categorizes the journals by fields of research, and it comes out clearly but unsurprisingly that the research on African business incubators is concentrated in the fields of Business and Management (23 journals) and Applied Economics (8 journals). The disciplinary distribution of the articles is unsurprising because the topic of business incubators is naturally situated in the context of business, management, and economics research.

Table 2. Number of publications by journal.

As of November 2, 2020, when the search was conducted, 31 of the 48 papers included in this study have been cited a total of 162 times, for an average of 5.2 citations per paper. Seventeen papers, representing 35% of the sample, have not been cited at all. The ten top-cited papers have all received above average citations and together account for 75% of the total citations (see Table A3 in Appendix). It is instructive to note that most (50%) of these top-cited papers are gold open access and a further 10% are green open access. This is consistent with some studies that suggest a positive correlation between open access and citations (e.g. Eysenbach Citation2006) and contrasts others such as Davis et al. (Citation2008) who found no such correlation. However, my finding is not definitive as I cannot rule out self-selection which, as argued by Gaule and Maystre (Citation2011), could mean that authors of higher quality papers are more likely to choose open access journals ex ante.Footnote5 After identifying top-cited authors, I confirmed their country of affiliation returned by Dimensions via a simple Google search of their exact names. The findings reported in Appendix Table A4 suggest that the top echelon of African incubators research is dominated by African researchers affiliated with institutions mainly in two countries: South Africa (54%) and Nigeria (38%). By most accounts, these two countries are among the top three research producers in Africa; and they are the top two producers of research in the social sciences (Egbetokun et al. Citation2022).

4.1.2. Intellectual foundations of business incubator research in Africa

So far, the evidence shows that the incubators literature in Africa started recently but is evolving, although it remains dominated by a few disciplines and countries. The co-citation network, a mapping of all studies that were mutually cited by two separate studies on incubation in Africa, gives us a hint on the key scholarly contributions that have influenced the shape and direction of the literature. The network shown in includes 1296 cited authors associated with 701 publications in total. The modal publication and author were cited only once. Only 229 (around 18%) of the authors associated with 65 (about 9%) of the publications have been cited at least twice. One of these 229 authors is not connected to any of the others.

Figure 3. Co-citation network of research on business incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

Note: Each bubble represents one paper, each line represents a co-citation link and bubble size is weighted by citations.
Figure 3. Co-citation network of research on business incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

In all, the 701 documents were cited 826 times at an average of 1.2 citations per document. Appendix Table A5 lists the most cited references. Three things come out of this list. First, African incubators research seems to rely heavily on foreign scholarship. In particular, 70% of the most cited references have been authored by non-Africans and only one journal in the list (Development Southern Africa) is published in Africa. Second, a few authors have exerted a huge influence on the research on business incubators in Africa. Nearly 40% of all citations in Table A5 in the Appendix are accounted for by four authors: S. M. Hackett, D. M. Dilts, A. Bergek and C. Norman. The most cited paper by far (13 citations) is a 2004 paper in the Journal of Technology Transfer by Hacket and Dilts. These authors published another paper in the same issue of the same journal which was cited 6 times in total. That issue of the Journal of Technology Transfer has been particularly influential, accounting for over a third of all the citations. Finally, the top cited papers appear predominantly in a few journals – mainly the Journal of Technology Transfer (3 publications) and Technovation (2 publications) – published outside Africa.

A look at the clusters in the co-citation network provides a hint on the different research streams that incubators research in Africa draws upon. The dominance of innovation, entrepreneurship, management, and economics research fields is obvious. As observed earlier, this disciplinary pattern is mirrored in the sample of 48 papers included in this study. The co-citation network has six clusters as follows:

  1. Cluster 1 features scholars mainly from the innovation economics and open innovation literatures, including Massimo Colombo, Henry Chesbrough, Anna Bergek and David Allen, among several 45 others.

  2. Cluster 2 mainly includes the works of scholars like Gary Bruton, Martin Kilduff, Michael Schwartz and Johan Wiklund mainly from the strategic management and organizational behaviour literatures.

  3. Cluster 3 has a strong presence of contributions from the entrepreneurship and development literature, including the works of scholars like Zoltan Acs, Erkko Autio, Alain Fayolle, Wim Naudé, Mike Wright and Friederike Welter.

  4. Cluster 4 features scholars like Alistair Anderson, Nicholas Bloom, Rosa Grimaldi, David McKenzie, Scott Shane, Dean Shepherd, Mark Schaffer, Antoinette Schoar and Benson Honig mainly from the development economics and entrepreneurship/innovation management literatures.

  5. Cluster 5 is a bit more eclectic than the preceding four clusters. It includes contributions from the science and technology studies, technology management, innovation theory and catch-up literatures. The cluster features the works of scholars like Elias Carayannis, Martin Bell, Sanjaya Lall, Daniel Levinthal, Wesley Cohen, Franco Malerba, Mark Dogson, Scott Stern and Richard Nelson, Oyeyemi Adegbite and Willie Siyanbola.

  6. Cluster 6 is also eclectic, including scholars like Moses Kiggundu from international business and management, and Nicolas Friederici whose work focuses on modern forms of entrepreneurship.

4.1.3. Research themes in African business incubator research

Following an understanding of the intellectual foundations, it is worthwhile to examine how the African incubators literature is currently structured in terms of thematic foci. This is achieved through citation analysis which identifies the prevailing research themes and the directions in which the research may evolve in future. Of the 48 papers included in this study, nine (19%) have been cited only once and 22 (46%) have been cited at least twice. shows the full citation network. Specifically, only 20 publications are in the largest connected component highlighted in the upper half and detailed in the bottom half of . It is striking to note a key attribute of the citation network: sparse connection among the papers, suggesting that African researchers who study business incubators do not ‘talk much to one another’. Evidence of this exists even in the largest connected component.

Figure 4. Citation network of research papers on business incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

Figure 4. Citation network of research papers on business incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

The connected component in the citation analysis comprises five clusters which correspond to five broad themes in the research on incubators in Africa ().

  1. Cluster 1 is the largest with five publications which generally focus on how incubators help typically under-resourced enterprises and the challenges they face in the process. The conceptual overview by Ndabeni (Citation2008) and sociological discussion by Pollio (Citation2020) describe the typology of incubators, the services they offer and their importance in the private sector ecosystem in South Africa. Zooming in on the Western Cape Province, the qualitative study of Lose and Tengeh (Citation2015) identified lack of sponsorship as well as limitations in geographical reach, production space and technology facilities as some of the challenges facing incubators in South Africa. Assenova (Citation2020) shows that early-stage incubation and mentoring promotes learning, scaling and profitability among socially and educationally disadvantaged entrepreneurs in South Africa. Kapinga et al. (Citation2018) illustrate how business incubators facilitate training as well as market and business network access for female entrepreneurs in Tanzania. They also highlight the need for incubators to tailor their support to incubatees’ needs in order to enhance incubation impact. All but one of these five studies are set in South Africa which probably explains why they cross-cited.

  2. Cluster 2 includes four studies in total, comprising three by Masutha and Rogerson (Citation2014a, Citation2014b, Citation2015) and one by Tselepis (Citation2018). These studies are in the same citation cluster for two main reasons: the dominance of a single pair of authors who apparently have self-cited and the common focus on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in South Africa. Specifically, Masutha and Rogerson (Citation2014b) cites Masutha and Rogerson (Citation2014a), Masutha and Rogerson (Citation2015) cites the two 2014 papers by the same authors while Tselepis (Citation2018) cites Masutha and Rogerson (Citation2014b). All studies consider the role of incubators in small and artisanal business development.

  3. Cluster 3 with four studies is the most diverse in terms of geographical context. It has two multi-country studies by Mvulirwenande and Wehn (Citation2020a, Citation2020b) that analyze virtual incubator cases in Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique, Benin, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal and Ethiopia. The study by Henricson Briggs (Citation2017) examined the support provided by business incubators in Tanzania from the entrepreneurs’ perspective, and the study of Meru and Struwig (Citation2015) performed a similar analysis in Kenya. These studies commonly highlight that different types of enterprises require different forms of support and incubators therefore need to be adaptive.

  4. Cluster 4 includes four studies that concentrate on the contributions of incubators to socioeconomic development through their catalytic role in enterprise development. Based on a case study, Bubou and Okrigwe (Citation2011) suggest that technology incubators are a viable means of promoting technological entrepreneurship and consequently reducing poverty. Akhuemonkhan et al. (Citation2014) argue that the government-owned technology incubation centres in Nigeria have had ‘very weak socio-economic impact on job creation, wealth creation and industrial development in Nigeria’. They recommend, among other interventions, the creation of incubators on the campuses of tertiary institutions. The paper by Iyortsuun (Citation2017) is the only quantitative study in this cluster. Using data from a sample of firms within an incubation ecosystem, it highlights the need for strategies to build the capacity of the incubators offer intensive business assistance and professional management services to their incubatees. Ikebuaku and Dinbabo (2018) observe the limited impact of a government policy that made entrepreneurship education compulsory in Nigerian universities since 2006 and note that graduate unemployment has not significantly reduced yet. They present business incubation as an effective tool to fill the entrepreneurial capabilities gaps that remain after entrepreneurship education.

  5. Cluster 5 comprising publications by Adelowo et al. (Citation2015), Adelowo (2020) land Adegbite (Citation2001), bears striking structural similarities to Cluster 4 where all studies are situated in the Nigerian context and Cluster 2 where one author is associated with the majority of the studies. Obviously, Adegbite (Citation2001) is cited in both Adelowo et al. (Citation2015) and Adelowo (2020). The latter study of Adelowo also cites the former. Adegbite (Citation2001) reviews the evolution of business incubators in Nigeria and provides specific recommendations on how to make the incubators more impactful, including inter alia integration into the enterprise support ecosystem. The two studies of Adelowo build upon this recommendation by examining a specific component of the enterprise support ecosystem to which incubators contribute, that is, technological learning. They highlight weak linkages with knowledge institutions and inadequate technical training facilities within the incubators as some of the major obstacles to technological learning by firms in incubators. To surmount these obstacles, they recommend greater investments in adequate training, proper linkages with research institutions and improved intra-firm technological learning efforts.

Table 3. Themes in incubators research in Africa.

Evidence from the bibliographic coupling substantiates the thematic pattern revealed by the citation analysis. The bibliographic coupling network maps articles based on their common references, under the assumption that a common reference indicates that two or more articles draw upon the same intellectual foundations (Ma et al. Citation2022). Thus, each cluster in the coupling network provides a picture of the topical or disciplinary areas around which the network nodes are organized. shows the largest connected component in the bibliographic coupling network of incubators research in Africa between 1993 and 2020. It contains 27 out of the total 48 publications included in this study, which are organized into five themes that closely align with the themes identified in the citation analysis.Footnote6 While the identified themes are diverse and comprehensive in their own rights, some major gaps exist that indicate possible future evolutionary directions of the literature. The next section contains a narrative discussion of these gaps.

Figure 5. Bibliographic coupling network of research on incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

Figure 5. Bibliographic coupling network of research on incubators in Africa, 1993–2020.

4.2. An agenda for future research

In light of the evidence in the preceding sections and of my reading of the African incubator literature, four clear gaps can be identified. These gaps summarized in present opportunities for future research that could shape the future evolution of the literature on business incubators in Africa. First, topical issues such as climate change and industrialization are conspicuously missing in the body of research. Without doubt, business incubators have a role to play in seeding enterprises that address these grand challenges in Africa. The absence of studies on them may indicate that they are out of scope for conventional business incubators or that the incubators are ill-suited for such enterprises.

Table 4. A proposed agenda for future research on business incubators in Africa.

Second, limited evidence exists on how to improve incubator support to businesses across sectors and countries. There are hardly any studies that closely examine the limits and potential opportunities for improving the specific forms of support that incubators offer across sectors and countries in Africa. Typically, most incubators offer training in entrepreneurship and business management, in addition to the conventional support services (Adegbite Citation2001; Akçomak Citation2011; Ganamotse et al. Citation2017). However, it has been reported recently that psychology-based training on entrepreneurial behaviours works better in enhancing firm performance in West Africa (Campos et al. Citation2017; Frese, Gielnik, and Mensmann Citation2016). Based on this, a case can be made for modifying existing incubator support services to include this kind of training. Studies providing evidence on this aspect will make policy-relevant contributions to the literature.

Third, some of the reviewed studies highlight the need for incubators to be adaptive given that the needs of businesses tend to vary across sectors, countries and growth stages. However, no evidence exists on how to design and implement adaptive, responsive and inclusive incubation systems. To achieve this, it is critically important to understand what works when. Studies that provide this sort of evidence will help to inform policies aimed at private sector development in Africa. For instance, the existing research provides very little insight about how well business incubators can support firms that work in new and rapidly emerging sectors like biotechnology, digital technologies and green technologies. Do conventional business incubators work for these sectors or do we need altogether new incubation models? How should these models be designed? An emerging stream of literature has typified a new incubation model, the so-called Do-It-Yourselves (DIY) tech hubs. These hubs typically offer a co-working space where technologists, computer scientists, programmers and web developers come together to network and share knowledge and skills to actualize their ideas (Kolade et al. Citation2021). According to Atiase, Kolade, and Liedong (Citation2020), such hubs are well suited to the knowledge economy and they are more effective in generating employment and expanding access to better quality public services although they require institutional support to thrive. Studies on how to support the emergence and growth of these DIY tech hubs are needed.

Finally, rigorous impact evaluations are conspicuously missing from the reviewed body of research. Indeed, quantitative impact evaluations of incubators are scarce (Akçomak Citation2011) and restricted to developed countries (e.g. Stokan, Thompson, and Mahu Citation2015; Schwartz Citation2013; Colombo and Delmastro Citation2002). With the exception of the one study by Assenova (Citation2020), impact assessment studies in Africa (e.g. Adegbite Citation2001; Adelowo, Olaopa, and Siyanbola Citation2012; Ganamotse et al. Citation2017; Siyanbola et al. Citation2012) are mainly qualitative and descriptive and offer limited insight on the causal impact of business incubators. Reliably assessing incubator impact requires rigorous quantitative analyses because qualitative assessments may be prone to social desirability bias when incubator managers, employees, tenants and other stakeholders are interviewed. This underscores the need to build up evidence on the impact of business incubators in Africa and other developing countries, to inform enterprise policy. Quantitative impact evaluations of incubators are hard to implement for two methodological challenges: one, it is difficult to define a universally acceptable set of performance assessment criteria because incubators vary in goals and expected outcomes (Akçomak Citation2011) and two, constructing a valid control group is challenging (Sherman and Chappell Citation1988). These challenges are deepened in Africa by a third one: the lack of appropriate administrative data such as registers of incubated businesses.

5. Summary and conclusion

Business incubators serve as vital policy instruments for catalyzing and nurturing entrepreneurial enterprises. Business incubators have proliferated in LICs starting from the 1990s and they are believed to support MSME performance (Leblebici and Shah Citation2004; Scaramuzzi Citation2002). These incubators have been the subject of a growing but fragmented body of research. A comprehensive and systematic analysis of existing knowledge is conspicuously absent from the literature. Combining standard systematic review methods with a narrative, this paper attempted to address this gap by organizing the body of research and identifying main intellectual traditions and trajectories. I must admit, however, that the coverage of this study may be limited given that I had used only one database. Notwithstanding, the database used has the advantages of being more comprehensive and significantly overlapping with the more conventional databases like Scopus which have been heavily critiqued for under-reporting research from Africa. I leave it to further studies to compare my findings with what a similar search in the more conventional databases will yield.

The bibliometric analyses show that research on incubators in Africa has only recently emerged but has been evolving steadily since the first paper appeared in 1993. Certain noteworthy trends emerge from the analysis. The existing body of literature on African incubators exhibits a degree of concentration. It is primarily rooted in the disciplines of business, management, and economics. This concentration, while valuable in providing foundational insights, underscores the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration to enrich our understanding further. Diversifying the scholarly lenses through which we view business incubators could open up new avenues for research. Similarly, geographic concentration is evident, with Nigeria and South Africa emerging as focal points for research. While these countries have played pivotal roles in incubation research on the continent, a more extensive geographical spread of research efforts is desirable. This expansion could shed light on unique regional dynamics and contribute to a more comprehensive African narrative.

The analyses picked up five major themes that have dominated the research on African incubators. These themes, encompassing incubator typology, performance, impact, role in start-up ecosystems, and their facilitation of firm-level learning, reflect the multifaceted nature of incubation efforts across the continent. Incubators are organizations that provide support to typically under-resourced enterprises, such as small and artisanal businesses, to help them grow and thrive. However, incubators face many challenges in the process, such as the diversity of enterprises’ needs, the lack of adequate resources and infrastructure, and the complex and dynamic market environment. Incubators play a vital role in small and artisanal business development by offering various forms of support, such as mentoring, training, networking, funding, and access to markets. Incubators also need to be adaptive and flexible to cater to the different needs and preferences of different types of enterprises. By supporting enterprises, incubators contribute to Africa’s socioeconomic development through their catalytic role in enterprise development. One of the key aspects of enterprise development is technological learning, which refers to the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills related to technology. Incubators facilitate technological learning by providing enterprises with access to information, equipment, tools, and innovation. Technological learning can enhance enterprises’ productivity, quality, competitiveness, and sustainability.

The identified themes serve as pillars upon which future research can build, offering robust foundations for in-depth investigations and policy deliberations. The bibliometric analyses also identified some gaps that represent compelling opportunities for future research, offering the potential to advance our comprehension of the multifaceted role of business incubators in Africa’s evolving entrepreneurial landscape. First, research is needed on the role of business incubators in addressing multidimensional issues including climate change and industrial development. Second, bridging the gap in incubator support across diverse sectors and countries represents an imperative task. Understanding how to tailor incubation strategies to different industries and regions can enhance their effectiveness and relevance. Third, the absence of evidence on the design and implementation of adaptive, responsive, and inclusive incubation systems is a noteworthy deficiency. Developing incubation models that can adapt to evolving entrepreneurial landscapes and address inclusivity challenges is vital for sustained growth. Lastly, the paucity of rigorous impact evaluations is a gap that needs urgent attention. Assessing the tangible effects of incubation programmes on businesses and the broader economy is pivotal for informed decision-making and the refinement of incubator practices.

To conclude, it is worth mentioning the clear and coherent agreement in the literature on the utility of business incubators. They represent a veritable tool for supporting the survival and growth of viable enterprises in Africa across different sectors. Scholars, practitioners and policymakers together will agree that Africa needs business incubators in its pursuit to reduce the burden of unemployment and foster industrial development. This study’s exploration of the African incubator literature has unveiled a promising but evolving field of research. By addressing the identified gaps and diversifying both disciplines and geographical focus, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners can collectively nurture a more comprehensive and effective ecosystem of business incubation in Africa. It is through such collaborative efforts that we can unlock the full potential of incubators as catalysts for innovation, economic growth, and entrepreneurship across the continent.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 5th Africalics Conference (November 2022) in Yaounde, Cameroon. Feedback from the conference participants as well as from the Editor and anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) programme, a joint initiative of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) [Grant Number ERG #7487].

Notes

1 For instance, a simple search with the keyword incubator on Dimensions on August 31, 2023, returned nearly 60,000 publications, of which less than 8000 were produced by authors affiliated with an African institution.

2 World Poverty Clock (worldpoverty.io, accessed October 30, 2020).

4 Defined based on the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) Fields of Research (FoR) categories; the default in the Dimensions database.

5 Methodology may also play a role. Most studies that report a positive relationship between open access and citation rates are cross-sectional while most that find no correlation are either experimental or longitudinal.

6 Specifically, the five themes from the bibliographic coupling are: (i) how different types of incubators offer support in diverse ways to different groups including MSMEs, digital entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs and artisanal businesses; (ii) how well business incubators facilitate innovation and the accumulation of capabilities by firms; (iii) exploration of the impact of incubators at the micro and macro levels, respectively in terms of firm performance and youth employment; (iv) the link between business incubators and the evolution of the start-up economy in different African countries, and (v) incubators as learning platforms.

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Appendix

Table A1. Full list of papers reviewed at full text in descending order of publication year.

Table

Table A2. ANZRC* fields of research and corresponding journals.

Table

Table A3. Top cited papers (greater than 5 citations).

Table

Table A4. Top cited authors (greater than 5 citations).

Table

Table A5. Top cited references by the research on African incubators (greater than 5 citations).

Table

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