Internal Incubators in Chinese State-owned Enterprises: Management Challenges

Since the late 1990s, many Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have estab-lished internal incubators to provide entrepreneurial outlets for core technologies.The authors interviewed senior SOE and incubator managers in China to identifyspecific dangers and challenges of SOE internal incubators. They also questionedmotivation and objectives of incubator management and strategy. Their researchbuilds on similar research done previously in China with non-SOE incubators, andinternal incubators of Western companies. Their research points to several funda-mental dilemas within SOE incubators relating to the incubators' role of technologycommercialization platforms and internal organizational change agents.