The role of business centres for firm performance. A social capital perspective

Whereas an extensive stream of literature has studied incubators, few researchers have focused on business centres, which typically host a broader set of firms, including medium and low tech firms. This paper studies the role of business centres for the network capabilities of their residents and the impact of business centre residence on performance. While we find the network capabilities of business centre residents to be more developed than those of non-residents, this mainly seems to originate from a selection mechanism, with business centres attracting residents with higher levels of network capabilities. The impact of business centre residence on firm performance is less obvious. While we find business centre residence to have a (marginal) positive effect on employment growth, no significant impact was found for revenue growth.

Publication year:2011

Keywords:business centres; residents;, networking capabilities, firm performance