Crowd-based Incubation: A new Pathway to Support Entrepreneurship

Business incubators are an important mechanism to accelerate the success of new ventures. The emergence of ubiquitous IT allows to provide several support services for start-ups via online platforms. One particularly promising approach is the concept of crowd-based incubation. To shed light on this novel topic we conducted a single case study at the crowd-based incubator JumpStartFund. The results provide several interesting insights and a preliminary conceptual model of crowd-based incubation that contributes on research of business incubators in general and provides valuable hints for practical applications that might extend the service offering of existing business incubators.