Abstract
Business incubation is a relatively new phenomenon in scholarship and
policy development for small enterprise development. Business incubators offer
targeted business support and technical support services to accelerate the growth
of emerging and small start-up business enterprises into financially and operationally
independent enterprises. South Africa has adopted business incubation
as one vehicle for upgrading the SMME economy. This article examines the evolution
of policy towards business incubation, current progress, institutional issues
and emerging geographies of business incubators as part of the unfolding
and dynamic SMME policy landscape in South Africa. Considerable differences
are observed between the activities of the network of state-supported incubators
as opposed to private sector operated incubators.