Resumo

The lack of proposals for evaluating the innovation capacities of business incubators - or even elementary discussions on the relationship between incubators and an innovation ecosystem - becomes evident when researching this topic in the most prestigious sources of the referred literature.

To fill this gap, this study verifies to what extent the technological innovation capabilities of Italian incubators support the performance of digital entrepreneurship in an innovation ecosystem.

Previous studies on Italian incubators are still limited, which makes many more studies to examine the effect of technological innovation capabilities on business performance more evident. Thus, Italian incubators were chosen because they are a good example of incubators that can affect and boost the performance of digital entrepreneurship in Italy.

The authors conducted a survey to the population of business incubator managers in Italy. Spearman's correlation was used to examine the relationship between technological innovation capabilities and the performance of digital entrepreneurship.

The findings of this research suggest that incubator managers focus their efforts mainly on the capabilities that most increase the proposal, the creation and the capture of value. This study is a guide for digital entrepreneurs, assisting them in choosing a space that offers better sustainability. Our findings suggest to public policy makers more focus on incentive policy for incubators, in order to better support their incubated ventures. In addition, our results serve as a guideline for funders in choosing more innovative projects.

Business incubators, as part of an innovation ecosystem, accelerate the innovation process, increase economic development through job creation, promote greater sustainability and value creation for incubated companies, and substantially expand their survival capacity.