Profiles of entrepreneurship and innovation: debate on business incubators in Brazil

Studying the themes of entrepreneurship and innovation, and to identify the profile of the incubators' managers and the entrepreneurs who incubate their ideas with the purpose to transform them into a new venture company allows a more accurate analysis of this system stimulated by public and private partnerships. This article proposes to study the profile of the actors of the business incubators and its respective companies. The research method is exploratory through a multi-cases study involving five business incubators of a total of 32, which are the most representative incubators and the most active in the Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The results point out intra-case peculiarities and data crossing thru inter-case analysis in order to detach convergent and divergent aspects with the business incubators and the incubated companies, identifying the actors of this environment through entrepreneurship and innovation characteristics, offering a picture of the actors studied in this context.