Development of a university based business incubation model for CEDAT

Abstract

In the National Industrial Policy (2008), the government of Uganda advocates at promoting the establishment of technology based incubators. The driving force behind this has been to foster innovation and enterprise creation. Universities in Uganda are trying to develop business incubators. The university based incubators provide training opportunity for students and serve as commercial outlets for faculty research. CEDAT, constituent college of Makerere University has many innovation ideas that have been generated. Many of these ideas have been developed into prototypes and for others, research has been done. But these tangible results have not been commercialized. This is because of lack of a designed framework to cater for this process. Thus the main objective was to develop a develop a CEDAT based business incubation model aimed at enabling the development of Small and Medium Enterprises, based on research and innovations. To develop the CEDAT incubation model, a study some of the available models of business incubation in Makerere University and other research institutions was done. The results of this and the literature review were used to develop a set of critical factors of incubation and finally construct a model for successful operation in universities. In order to achieve this, the abductive approach was used, since it combined inductive procedure where incubators activities were observed. Also the deductive procedure was used where models and theories were mentioned and questioned. This was done in-order to understand and generate new models that applied to the reality in Uganda. Results showed that not all the critical factors that are applicable in the international literature are also applicable to Uganda specifically to National Software Business incubation Centre, and Food Technology Business Incubation Center. But some of the factors were common for both. This research therefore investigated all the possible factors for a successful business incubation setup. In chapter six, under recommendations, a set of factors were listed. The final important factors included: a lay out, revenue model of the incubator, a proved management structure, selection and exit criteria, incubator infrastructure, networking process, sustainability and a good set of business support services. If CEDAT applied such a model, there would be success in producing entrepreneurs from the university through a successful system