What are the key components of an entrepreneurial ecosystem in a developing economy? A longitudinal empirical study on technology business incubators in China

Since the 1980s, technology business incubators (TBIs), which focus on accelerating businesses through resource sharing, knowledge agglomeration, and technology innovation, have become a booming industry. As such, research on TBIs has gained international attention, most notably in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China. The present study proposes an entrepreneurial ecosystem framework with four key components, i.e., people, technology, capital, and infrastructure, to investigate which factors have an impact on the performance of TBIs. We also empirically examine this framework based on unique, three-year panel survey data from 857 national TBIs across China. We implemented factor analysis and panel regression models on dozens of variables from 857 national TBIs between 2015 and 2017 in all major cities in China and found that a number of factors associated with people, technology, capital, and infrastructure components have various statistically significant impacts on the performance of TBIs at either national model or regional models.