Technology and entrepreneurship are considered to be the driving forces for economies across the globe to achieve their developmental destinations. Synchronization of these two forces is fundamental to any economy, to attain global leadership by fostering technology-based entrepreneurship. This trend has steered immense rise in policies encircling startup creation and business incubation in India and other developing economies. However, ambiguity in understanding the influential factors stimulating entrepreneurship development has impeded the desired outcome of such policies. This study is an attempt to propose a comprehensive model for entrepreneurship development by fostering entrepreneurial intentions through the catalyzing support of technology business incubators. Firstly, this study tries to explore the individual and contextual antecedents affecting perceived desirability and feasibility for adopting an entrepreneurial career. Secondly, we propose to identify and explore the key success indicators of university-linked technology business incubators (TBIs). The proposed hypothesized model will be empirically investigated and validated by adopting relevant research methods.
The proposed study is exploratory in nature, which would aim to gather primary data from ten (10) units of CFTIs (IITs & NITs) in India and their linked TBIs to probe and testify the proposed model. A combination of methodologies will be used for the study such as survey, focus group and case study method. Two sampling techniques used for this study are purposive sampling to select ten numbers TBIs (established before 2010) & undergraduate engineering final year student population, and simple random sampling to select student respondents from the population. The responses collected shall be analyzed through appropriate analytical tools to validate the hypothesized model empirically.
The study will enlighten and enable the academicians, researchers, and policy makers to develop frameworks to promote a holistic environment to foster entrepreneurial intentions of young individuals and strengthen the business incubation process by adopting best practices. This study would aid the policymakers as a tool for benchmarking the existing TBIs in India and help achieve their operational goal in supporting entrepreneurs and their wider goals in generating employment opportunities, accelerating economic development and establishing an entrepreneurial society. Research on entrepreneurial intentions and TBIs are mostly done in developed countries, and there is an acute dearth of research in emerging economies like India. This study attempts to fill this gap by offering the new insights into the central role of entrepreneurial intention in accelerating entrepreneurship development through catalyzing support of TBIs in the Indian context.