Startups are crucial for economic development because they create new jobs in many countries worldwide. However, startups have a high failure rate because they often lack enough resources. To solve this problem startups receive assistance from business incubators (BIs) is a well-known phenomenon. Although BIs have numerous resources and some BIs even receive high scores in performance evaluations mechanism made by policy makers, these BIs do not exactly present the service capabilities to assign the right resources to the right places to assist tenants’ long-term business development. In a review of the literature on BIs, most of the literatures disussed BI development, BI configuration, the services that BI provided to tenants, tenants’ development, few of them discussed BI service capability for providing tenants with the correct assistance to overcome difficulties. BI service capability and the success rate of tenants’ long-term business development have high degree of correlation. Therefore, this study adopted the exploratory research method to construct preliminary BI service capability indicators. After that, this study adopted the semi-structured interview research method and combined opinions from service suppliers (BIs) and service demanders (tenants) to confirm the vailidity of these service capability indicators. The preliminary BI service capability indicator contents were revised based on the interviewees’ suggestions, obtaining suggested service capability indicators for BIs. In order to settle the problem of BI capital limitation, this study adopted the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) research method to prioritize the importance of these service capability indicators. Then after adopting the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to understand the relationships among these service capability indicators, 19 important conclusions are proposed. This study applied the Likert scale to confirm the 19 conclusions’ reliability in fitting the BI industry reality or not. BIs could progressively supplement their service shortcomings based on the research results. According to the research resultsBIs should put more effort into advanced services over basic services to fit the requirement for assisting tenant’s long-term business development. The importance priority of advanced services is business planning, executive strategy and institutionalization service. Business planning is the most important service dimension and should be constructed first. Executive strategy and institutionalization services will be constructed completely after business planning service is constructed. In the business planning service dimension, market demand verification is the most important indicator for tenants. BIs will increase the requirement for market demand verification and Business management design services when the market demand verification service requirement has increased. In the executive strategy service dimension, market entering plan (exposure/participation) and marketing value-added plan services will be constructed after breakeven and profit plan services are constructed. In the institutionalization service dimension, staff team composed (recruit/ training) and document management system composed services will be constructed completely after brand construction plan service is constructed. It is worth noting that the importance of document management system service is higher than perceived before. BIs should pay more attention to this. As for basic services, the importance priority is human resources, capital, networking, intellectual property and Space & equipment service. This study is concluded with management implications for BI directors and managers, BI policy makers and potential BI tenants.
Keywords: Startups; Business Incubator (BI); Service Capability; Entrepreneurship