A QUESTION OF EVALUATION - NBIAS IMPACT ASSESSMENT OF BUSINESS INCUBATORS

The latest report on the impact of business incubators distributed by the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) suffers from sever e shortcomings that undermine claims being made for it. Claims of meth odological improvements are spurious, as are those for ''added value'' of the study results over previous incubator impact studies. It is li kely that these claims, however; will be used by NBIA and other promot ers of business incubator projects to appeal to sources of funding at all levels to support both capital and operating costs of such project s. Even though the latest study focused an a rather select subset of t he incubator universe, 40 of the 50 incubators analyzed still have not been able to break even. NBIA still has a way to go before it can pro vide, or help others to produce, valid performance evaluations, perfor mance benchmarking results, and management information that can help i ncubators attain financial self-sustainability as well as other perfor mance benchmarks.