Ideology, incompetence and reflexivity in a university incubator

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is surrounded by ideology and its attendant myths. This study examines how this entrepreneurial ideology is propagated in a specific setting, namely university in-cubators. Based on interviews with employees and student-entrepreneurs in the incubator of a Scandinavian university, we observe both direct and indirect processes of ideological transmission. Employees in the incubator promote the incubator to students, and their pro-motion efforts draw extensively on ideology to encourage and justify student participation in the incubator. Students-entrepreneurs entering the incubator do not question the ideology, but often use it to promote the incubator to other students. However, three distinct types of “incompetence experience” can prompt students to reflect on both the incubator and the entrepreneurial ideology. Uniformly, incompetence experiences lead students to cynically distance themselves from the incubator and to cease promoting it. Depending on the type of incompetence experience, students engage in either ideology-rejection (leading to non-transmission of ideology) or ideology-affirmation (leading indirectly to a more extensive transmission of ideology). These findings extend current conceptions of how entrepreneurial ideology diffuses within society and within higher education and raises questions about the role of incubators within universities and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

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