Business incubation initiatives’ impacts on entrepreneurs and SMEs

Abstract

Business incubation (BI) is a strategic tool that helps a country to grow its entrepreneurial base and reduce the high mortality rate of SMEs. The Kingdom of Eswatini adopted the business incubation initiatives to promote entrepreneurship and SME development. To date, no data exist on the impact made by business incubation initiatives. Adopting methodological triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative data collected through questionnaires and interviews where the participants consisted of SME owners, BI managers, and BI trainers, this exploratory study aims to investigate business incubation initiatives’ impact on entrepreneurs and SMEs. Findings reflect that BI measures its impact by seeing an increase in revenue, increase in the number of people employed, and SME survival post the incubation period. Though SMEs agreed that the BI affects positively, the study also revealed that some SMEs remained in the incubation for more than 10 years. Policy implications emerging are the need to introduce graduation policy and proper determination of requirements for incubation.