Abstract
In recent years, incubators have played an increasing role in nurturing early stage start-ups. This research aims to identify critical criteria in the selection of start-up incubator residents. Such criteria could potentially serve as a guideline for start-ups to sharpen their applications to incubators, and also provide an assessment method for incubator managers to select start-ups. Previous studies have introduced some important screening factors in the selection process, largely based on interviews and surveys of the opinions of incubator managers. Despite diverse findings by far, there have been no effort to identify the key success characteristics using real start-up company profiles. This research, based on prior findings, proposes an assessment method based on the Real-Win-Worth framework. This new method is used to evaluate a data set of 280 application profiles of start-ups submitted to a prestigious incubator based in Singapore. Our results suggest “working website”, “recommendation”, “demand validation”, “market demographics”, “concept maturity”, “sales/distribution channel” and “technology expertise” are crucial for the applicants to pass initial profile screening. After the screening stage, “competitive advantage”, “prior start-up experience”, “feedback mechanism” and “growth potential and strategy” are critical for final admission into the incubator. The assessment method and these findings could help entrepreneurs self-evaluate and improve their start-ups for successful selection into incubators, and also offer implications for incubator management.