Geography of Business Incubator Formation in the United States

The geography of business incubators has seldom been examined against the public aspirations and beliefs that incubators should either inhabit economically distressed areas to alleviate unemployment and poverty (in the case of empowerment business incubators) or proliferate in technologically capable regions to adequately unleash and exploit local high-technology potentials (in the case of technology business incubators). In this paper, the geographic distribution of 719 U.S. business incubators, which are located in 465 out of the 3,141 counties, is examined drawing upon a newly built incubator population database. In addition, the location factors underlying the formation of business incubators are also identified and analyzed, which leads to the discovery of a dichotomy between rural and urban incubators in their locational determinants.