New decision support system for university incubators

University incubators help students excel in innovation and entrepreneurship, culminating in the creation of innovative and impactful startups. However, most of these incubators are still in their beginning, so their success depends on trial and error.

This experience prompted the two heads of the ImpactLab at the FHNW School of Business to investigate the success factors of university incubators. “We went beyond empirical work and opted for the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, which combines literature findings with expert interviews. This allowed us to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) that can recommend good and best practices for any university incubator,” explains Dr. Laurenzi. According to Laurenzi, “the DSR method is widely used in information systems and is well suited to research questions that are relevant to both research and practice. In addition, the DSS can be seen as a maturity test for a university incubator that is able to identify weaknesses and make appropriate recommendations.

Assessment of a University Incubator

The method is described in detail in the conference paper "A Decision-Support Approach for University Incubators ”. 

The ImpactLab is the first university incubator at the FHNW and was launched in 2020 at the FHNW School of Business under the direction of Dr. Emanuele Laurenzi and Dario Meyer. The ImpactLab has already supported more than 100 students. About a dozen of them have won Swiss Innovation and Start-up competitions. For example, student Elena Börlin and her Start-up sefit took second place behind a team of doctoral students from ETH in the most recent Talent Pitch, in which students from various Swiss university incubators compete against each other. In the meantime, successful start-ups have emerged from several projects as, z.B. MComTech, PlaynVoice, AI-Tails.