Opening the Black Box of Incubation: Governance Archetypes and the Moderating Role of Regional Innovation Ecosystems in Start-up Growth (Best Paper Award IFKAD 2026)

Start-ups are widely recognised as key drivers of national competitiveness, contributing to economic growth and technological progress through their ability to innovate, adapt, and generate new markets. However, despite their strategic relevance, they face substantial barriers in the stages of development, including limited financial, organisational, and managerial resources, which constrain their ability to successfully commercialise innovations. As a result, firm survival remains a critical challenge, with a large share of start-ups exiting within a few years and only a minority achieving long-term sustainability. In this context, business incubators (BIs) have become widely adopted policy and managerial instruments aimed at supporting start-ups’ development. They provide a combination of tangible and intangible resources, including physical infrastructure, advisory services, managerial support, and access to external networks, with the objective of improving start-up survival and growth prospects. However, despite their diffusion, existing research provides mixed evidence regarding their actual effectiveness, often conceptualising incubation as a “black box” with heterogeneous and context-dependent outcomes. This study addresses this gap by examining how public and private BI governance archetypes and regional innovation ecosystem development jointly shape start-up performance. Using a sample of 659 innovative start-ups hosted in 62 certified BIs in Italy, the analysis employs OLS regression models with clustered standard errors, integrating firm-level data from the Italian Business Register (IBR) and AIDA database for the period 2023-2024. The findings indicate that start-ups supported by private BIs achieve significantly higher revenue growth compared to those hosted in public BIs. However, this performance gap is not uniform across contexts. The level of regional innovation development positively moderates the effectiveness of public BIs, reducing their performance disadvantage in more advanced ecosystems. While private BIs exhibit robust performance regardless of territorial conditions, public BIs appear more dependent on external ecosystem quality. Finally, this research provides implications for managers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.