BUSINESS INCUBATORS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC: WELL SPENT MONEY?

The aim of this study is to analyze business incubators in the Czech Republic using publicly available data. Business incubators are used worldwide to support creation and development of entrepreneurial ventures. In the Czech Republic, there have been many incubators founded in the last decade, visibly due to inflow of EU funding. Surprisingly, there is no public register of incubators. This study offers the first overview of business incubators in the Czech Republic. Due to instable terminology concerning business incubators, we took the support of new entrepreneurial activity as a defining characteristic of a business incubator and created a list of organizations that offers this kind of services. Result of our study is a list of 51 institutions offering support to new companies or teams with ideas. This support takes various forms ranging from office rental to funding. The highest number of venues are in Prague and majority have been financed from EU funds. There are 21 publicly owned venues, 23 privately owned and 7 privately and publicly co-owned organizations. Almost eighty percent of incubators offer office space rental. Results show that business incubators in the Czech Republic differ and we need to start monitoring their performance in order to understand their added value, not just for incubated companies, but also for the economy as a whole. It is surprising, that in relation to huge funding by public money, there has been no effort made to systematically analyze incubators in the Czech Republic.