| Abstract |
Entrepreneurship and incubation are pillars upon which a strong innovation environment can be built nationally. Entrepreneurship is at the heart of sustainable, organic growth for most developed, as well as transitioning and developing economies. Incubation programmes can help bridge knowledge, digital, socio-political and even cultural divides and help increase the availability, awareness, accessibility and affordability of financial, human, intellectual, and even social capital, the key ingredients of entrepreneurial success. Business incubators have often served as catalysts and even accelerators of entrepreneurial cluster formation and growth in many developed economies. Incubation is widely accepted as a successful model for start-up facilitation, providing the entrepreneur with the business planning, financial, legal, marketing and mentoring support that the emerging entrepreneur requires. The Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS) Programme which has been operational since 2011-2014, identified a critical need in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) region to address this shortcoming and focuses some of their work on incubation and entrepreneurship in supporting and developing a value chain across the entire incubation spectrum. SAIS aim is to support and enhance the capability of existing and new incubation intermediaries directly, something which seems to be neglected in some economies, thus enabling the incubation intermediaries to provide their incubatees with skills, facilitation, know how, technical advice and support in order to create and maintain successful businesses. This paper reviews the incubation landscape in Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia, looking for common challenges and problems and possible mechanisms for facilitation of support. We then highlight a few case studies on specific public and privately funded incubator intermediaries, the enabling environment they create across a variety of sectors, and strategies they deploy in their operations. Other facilitation mechanisms adopted by SAIS in supporting and enhancing the function of incubator intermediaries and the strategies deployed to improve their role in the incubation and entrepreneurship domain is also presented. |