Business Incubation in Brazil: Creating an Environment for Entrepreneurship

Business incubators, by providing timely help and support to new ventures, hold the potential to create and develop entrepreneurial talent at the micro-level and foster an environment for entrepreneurship at the macro level. Today, with approximately 400 incubators and a well-developed incubation ecosystem, Brazil leads one of the most successful incubation movements in Latin America, through innovation and adaptation of incubator models to suit indigenous needs. Brazilian incubation is very much a bottom up process with the university acting as a key catalyst and facilitator. Even though incubation as a business creation tool has not gained widespread currency, multiple levels of government and a rainbow coalition of partners from various spheres appear to be involved in supporting incubators. The government has clearly made incubators a policy priority as witnessed by the various initiatives to support incubators and incubatees alike. The emphasis in Brazil appears to be more on the “softer” services such as networking relative to the provision of physical space and hard infrastructure. In this sense, incubators in Brazil are indeed transitioning to the newer approaches to incubation that relies less on the hardware of incubation and more on the software of value adding services.