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Startup incubation at universities is becoming increasingly important due to their ability to promote entrepreneurship among students and to increase the chance of survival of the created ventures. Moreover, due to the typically longer years of work experience of MBA students relative to other students, MBA students represent a key segment that such programs should target as previous research has shown that experience is a success factor in startup founders. However, there is little research in available literature on how to design startup incubation programs to maximize the participation and success of MBA students.
In this thesis, startup incubation programs at some leading universities around the world is surveyed. The goal is to come up with a framework inspired by the traits, internal or eco-system based, common to the successful university-based startup incubators. By evaluating these success factors with the preferences of MBA students, the thesis proposes certain services or processes that should be considered to design a university-based incubation program for MBA students. The result will be useful to university managers seeking to build an enduring entrepreneurial ecosystem and improve the entrepreneurial support services at their universities, especially for MBA students.
The thesis is composed of two aspects: first and foremost, desk research is conducted to catalogue the support services that are available to student entrepreneurs at some leading university-based startup incubators around the world. Secondly, a case study of part-time MBA students at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin) is conducted through a survey and series of interviews. The study reveals several interesting results:
• All the studied startup incubators offer comparable basic services including, mentorship, workspace, seminars, funding, network, etc. The key difference is how those services are provisioned and the extent to which they use specific services to differentiate themselves.
• The universities place entrepreneurship at a center stage with the involvement of the universities’ top management and several institutions within and outside the universities, i.e., they build entrepreneurial ecosystems, rather than isolated startup incubation programs.
• The universities leverage their relative strengths or situation in their entrepreneurial support services e.g., technologically oriented universities such as MIT, Technion, NUS and TUM, focus on creating an environment where more innovation is created and on technology commercialization, Stanford University offers remarkable access to Silicon Valley, SETsquared partnership raises the profile of its members by creating critical mass in a regional alliance.
• Stanford University and MIT have diverse programs that give students multiple entry points to the ecosystems and allow the students’ experience to be easily customizable according to their needs.
• The case study showed an improved entrepreneurial self-efficacy (self-confidence) among the MBA students during the period of their MBA studies. Of equal significance, the study also showed a higher degree of improvement among final year students compared to first-year students of the two-year program. This could hint towards a modular design of startup incubation programs for MBA students, with more advanced activities left for the later part of the program.
• The survey revealed the preference of MBA students for a strong network, availability of mentors and coaches, and access to funding at their startup incubation center. A revelation which further strengthens the case for creating ecosystems.
Scholars have suggested that design thinking and effectuation theory may enrich each other. However, to date, we lack deeper theorizing and empirical evidence to further advance this valuable discourse for the benefit of innovation management. Our qualitative study draws on 41 in-depth interviews with Australian designer-founders, with the aim to provide a theoretical perspective on and empirical insights into the relationship between the behavioral practices of design thinking and the cognitive principles of effectuation. The contributions are twofold. First, our study explains how design thinking practices enable designer-founders to enact the cognitive principles of effectuation. Uncovering these “entrepreneurial ways of designing” provides an explanation for the effectiveness of design thinking for entrepreneurial innovation and new venture creation. Second, our study sheds light on the ways in which designer-founders interpret effectuation principles through the professional values and norms embodied in design thinking. These “designerly ways of entrepreneuring” resemble particular, normative interpretations of effectual action. By doing so, our study offers empirical substantiation and theoretical elaboration of the ways in which design thinking functions as an approach for entrepreneurial innovation and new venture creation. Through shedding light on the “entrepreneurial ways of designing” and “designerly ways of entrepreneuring” exhibited by designer-founders, our research reveals the reciprocal relationship between design thinking and effectuation theory.