Virtual Incubators: A Tool for Developing Entrepreneurship in Universities

Farshad, Siyamak; Fathian, Mahammad; Ebrahimi, Babak; Nalchigar, Sorosh

doi:10.22047/ijee.2008.582

Virtual Incubators: A Tool for Developing Entrepreneurship in Universities

Document Type : Scientific - Research

Authors

Siyamak Farshad ¹

Mahammad Fathian ²

Babak Ebrahimi ³

Sorosh Nalchigar ⁴

¹ Assistant Professor, Iran University of Science and Technolofy, Department of Railway Engineering

² Assistant Professor, Iran University Science and Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering

³ MSc.Student, Sharif University, Deoartment of Economy

⁴ MSc. Student, Tehran University, Department of Management

https://doi.org/10.22047/ijee.2008.582

Abstract

Today, communities’ capitals such as manpower and financial resource have cumulated in universities and industries because of significant growth of these two parts. With daily increasing development of sciences and industries, the distance between these two critical elements of communities is increasing. Reduction of the distance between science and industry on the one hand and decrement of researches’ costs conducted in commercialization on the other has stimulated communities to use new tools entitled incubators. These incubators today have local and temporal boundaries. Moreover these incubators have low flexibility and performance variety. In order to optimize allocation of limited resources, incubators have been forced to act in a specified university or area and sometimes, define severe employment and support rules. Virtual incubators, because of their popularity and market universality, resulted from their virtual shay and ability to apply information technology, have employment power and comprehensiveness in national and international level through enhancement of small and medium industries. In this paper, we describe concepts of incubators and their evolution and examine their performance in commercialization of researches findings. Then we introduced virtual incubators and their increasing role in economical development and optimized use of resources. Consequently, virtual incubators model, by applying modern technologies as a powerful agent for removing employment problem and making economical development from macro influence point of view are presented.

Keywords

Virtual incubators

Entrepreneurship

economical development

Modern Technologies