Mapping the Social Business Incubator Landscape

Abstract

There is a wide gap between the wealth of different types of social business support organizations in practice and the academic description of this reality. While social entrepreneurship in general is a growing field and continuous to attract research attention, the description, let alone theorizing, regarding social business incubation lags far behind. Therefore, in this paper, we review the important, first scholarly ventures into this topic of social business incubation and describe by means of exemplary cases different types of social enterprise incubators. We describe theoretical implications of the described differences between the approaches and conclude with a research agenda.

Keywords: Business Incubators, Social Business Incubators, Social Enterprise Incubators, Social Entrepreneurship

JEL Classification: M13, L31, O35