Assessing the efficacy of rural business incubation: a diagnostic approach from the United States
- 1999
- p.29-49
- Mar
The rapid spread of the business incubation concept as an economic development tool for fighting rural poverty in the United States, without a complete understanding of the unique problems faced by rural incubation programmes and the entrepreneurs they serve, should be a matter of concern to economic development planners. Traditional efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of rural business incubation programmes based on measures of economic development output (e.g., businesses created, jobs created, income generated, etc.) don't address this problem. This study suggests a process oriented approach to evaluating rural incubation programme effectiveness that focuses on identifying context-specific barriers and examining the success of the programme practices that are designed to surmount them. It also reports the results of the application of this evaluation model to the U.S. rural business incubation industry. - Reproduced