Samenvatting

In the nineties of the last century, a lot of (ICT) incubators started in the Netherlands, many private (GorillaPark, Ant Factory, Lost Boys and Newconomy), some public, such as Twinning. Most of them stopped early this century or gone bankrupt. From 2005 university incubators like YesDelft!, Erasmus MC Incubator, UtrechtInc, Biopartner and ACE opened their doors to students which operate alongside the curriculum. Afterwards also incubators of colleges aroused, often integrated with education. Enterprize of the The Hague University of Applied Science was one of the first ones. In recent years, all kinds of private initiatives arises, called Accelerators (Rock Start and Start-Up Boot Camp).
The primary purpose of an incubator is to create successful entrepreneurs, for different reasons. Much research has been done to the success rate of companies through incubators. It is assumed that the entrepreneur of a successful business should have learned a lot in this initial period. In the emerged entrepreneurial education it is therefore assumed that incubators also should be a good tool for students to quickly and efficiently learn. But is that so?

As a successful serial entrepreneur, I started more than ten incubators. Most of them were a tool for regional development, cluster development or for further investments (private equity). Now he wanders if an incubator can also be a tool for teaching. He has been given the opportunity to researche this at the The Hague university for applied sciences; “What is the (added) value for entrepreneurship education of an incubator?”
This paper is a preamble to that research and a call for participation.