Abstract
Business incubators are a vehicle to assist the survival prospects of start-up enterprises, many of which fail in their early years of operation. One special form of business incubator is the Climate Innovation Centre (CIC) which is part of international debates around green economies and appropriate technologies for climatecompatible development. CICs are an intervention to build innovation sites to ameliorate climate change and a highly distinctive form of business incubator in which the explicit focus is upon supporting small business startups allied to the application of green technologies. Using a qualitative approach the article analyses the establishment and operations of the Gauteng Climate Innovation Centre in South Africa. The CICSA in its first five years of operations has been ‘learning through experience’ and introduced a number of changes since its launch in 2012, including an extension of the business incubation programme and an adjusted focus to South Africa’s climate change related ‘green’ issues around energy, water and waste. Although 5 years is too short for a conclusive evaluation of CIC operations the evidence from this research with South African clean-tech enterprises is largely positive and suggests that the assistance provided by the CIC has contributed towards enterprise development.
Highlights
The positive health of the small business economy is viewed as crucial for current and future economic development prospects in sub-Saharan Africa (Rogerson, 2018a)
Friendly innovations assist in reducing negative human impacts on the environment and are vital for countries to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of current climate change (Sagar & Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2010). This said, the transition to a green economy has proven challenging across the global South and, given the significance of climate change, international development organizations recommend the application of development assistance to ease the green economy transition, including the roll out of green technologies associated with Climate Innovation Centre (CIC)
Overall for enterprises to be accepted into the incubation programme they must be aligned with the three primary goals of CIC, namely to advance the prospects of achieving sustainable development, facilitate a transition to a green economy through innovative green technologies and make a positive contribution to climate mitigation and adaptation
Summary
The positive health of the small business economy is viewed as crucial for current and future economic development prospects in sub-Saharan Africa (Rogerson, 2018a). Several international examples of business incubation programmes target what would be described as ‘survivalist enterprises’ most incubation activity concentrates upon strengthening the business survival prospects of groups of dynamic, growth-oriented earlystage enterprises (Tengeh & Choto, 2015; Rogerson, 2018a) The latter usually are innovative small enterprises which are seen as critical potential catalysts for future job creation and accompanying economic and social development (Rogerson, 2018b). There have been certain advances in research to accompany the most established initiatives in Africa which occur in South Africa for applying business incubation as part of the toolkit for small enterprise support (Masutha & Rogerson, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Lose et al, 2016; Rogerson, 2018a) Another recent research focus is the impact of business incubators on women entrepreneurs in the continent (Kapinga et al, 2018). Attention turns to analyse in detail the establishment and operations of South Africa’s Climate Innovation Centre
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