Sujetos

Number Position/Business area Sex

1 University representative M

2 Government support organization official M

3 Entrepreneur/Food F 4 Embassy M 5 Entrepreneur/Food production M 6 Business incubator M 7 Business incubator M 8 Entrepreneur/Food production F

9 Development aid agency M

10 Entrepreneur/Printing and Radio station M 11 Government support organization official M

12 Entrepreneur/Microfinance M

13 Business incubator manager M

14 Entrepreneur/IT M

15 Entrepreneur/IT M

16 Entrepreneur/Café F

17 Entrepreneur/IT and electronics M

18 Entrepreneur/Fashion F

19 Development aid agency 1F + 1M

20 Pre-incubator F

21 Business development services M

22 Business incubator M

23 Financial support

Mixed group 24 Private business incubator/business coaching M

25 National support organization Group M

26 Development aid agency M

27 Entrepreneur/Agriculture M

28 Entrepreneurship competition M

29 Entrepreneur/Transport M

30 Entrepreneur/Consultant M

31 Business incubator manager F

32 Entrepreneur/IT M

33 Entrepreneur/Marketing M

34 Entrepreneur/Mobile technology M

35 Entrepreneur/ Business development consultant M 36 Entrepreneur/ Business development consultant M

37 Entrepreneur/Service F

38 Entrepreneur/Service and delivery M

39 Entrepreneur/IT M

40 Entrepreneur/Research consultant M

41 Entrepreneur/ Recruitment F

42 Business incubator manager F

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Entrepreneurship was discussed, in the interviews and the workshops, from the basic necessity entrepreneurship for people who have to survive the day, to the educated youth who want to create something, even on the side of an existing job. Because of the high unemployment among the youth there is a need for solutions on the labour market and the question of what that solution should be often includes entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship becomes a reaction to the lack of employment and is spread as a solution that may support the country. The same staff member from a pre-incubator shared this about entrepreneurship

“entrepreneurship is a buzz word – they know they should do it but, from the government side it is in the plans, strategies and score cards, but they don’t have a clue about how, one teacher said they used to go there and tell the students: be entrepreneurial, think outside the box and then they fled the room”

Pre-incubator staff, #20

Within the described context, there is also the question of how the business incubators are operating. How business incubators function varies depending on purpose and a broad range of other factors such as management and local conditions for entrepreneurs. The five business incubators visited in Dar-es-Salaam are good examples of this broad variety where it is not only the purpose that is different but also the organizations and how things are structured. The material includes both government owned business incubators and private initiatives. The private initiatives are more recently established and driven by founders that often have been abroad and wish to make an impact and a change in Dar-es-Salaam. In the interviews, the managers or employees of the business incubators were asked about how they run their organizations and also about examples of successful entrepreneurship coming from their organizations. They defined successful entrepreneurship themselves and their responses to these questions were considered one way of describing how the business incubators are operating. As mentioned previously, how one would talk about successful entrepreneurship in Dar-es-Salaam is partly cultural and discussing successful entrepreneurs turned out to be hard with few examples being forthcoming. It was difficult to understand more about the outcomes of the organizations through the interviews because the entrepreneurs do not necessarily share their progress with the business incubator staff. According to the interviewees it is not appropriate to talk about your success, or how you reached it, in Tanzania.

“…many don’t want to expose their success…they don’t want to, the regulatory authorities will monitor them…that’s why it’s difficult to know who is doing good…”

Business incubator staff, #7

As this staff member of a business incubator describes it, the culture does not appreciate people who share their success and furthermore, some are afraid of the authorities and others mention that there is a suspicion that people would steal your idea if it has been successful. Additional reasons mentioned in the interviews are that corruption makes it difficult to succeed and to share your story. Although questions about successful entrepreneurship were included in all interviews there were few examples both from the actual organizations and the entrepreneurs. One entrepreneur explained the foreign efforts to support entrepreneurs with that

“…there has been a lot of financing programs coming in, maybe they have all had good purpose but nothing has been successful yet…”

Entrepreneur, #35

After the limited results from the interviews a search on the internet was done to find out if there was some information to find. The result was scarce, some of the business incubators do not have working web pages and the others have no figures or stories about the outcome.

Another part of the operations that turned out to be interesting was how the entrepreneurs find and apply to the business incubators. The admission process to the business incubators are partly based on the purpose of the business incubator, the most recently established organizations make an effort of marketing themselves more than the government run organization that is the most known in

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Tanzania for supporting entrepreneurs. However, all of them basically have some kind of admission process of interviews, rules or prerequisites that needs to be fulfilled to enter the business incubator. Interestingly, one incubator seems to recruit their entrepreneurs instead of choosing from applications to the incubator. Management is clearly influenced by American standards on business incubation including staff coming over from the US on a regular basis. This business incubator has been initiated together with the World Bank program for business incubation and has government support. They also have different rules depending on who the entrepreneur is, supporting some more than others. When interviewing the entrepreneurs they shared that some of them were found by the incubator and invited to become tenants through a recruitment process and few of them found the incubator and applied on their own initiative to become tenants.

“Yes, from that programming challenge, and from the university where I was studying, the CEO over here he heard about me being into technology and when I won the challenge it’s when he found me.” Entrepreneur, #14

The chosen entrepreneurs are quite successful and the incubator seems to be efficient and successful in the sense that the entrepreneurs are successful in competitions and have a good reputation abroad. However, this particular organization gives the impression that the outcome is a construction more than a result of the actual organization. In addition, this is also mentioned in more general terms in one of the interviews

“…it seems like 85% of the emphasis on this is what it looks like, this looks like an incubator and there are more bodies in each room we are happy, we will bring the press here and we will tell in interviews how great we are doing, but whether it creates any value or they are doing any sensible things with any of their business ideas, whether they are getting any value more than an office place nobody cares…”

Pre-incubator staff, #20

One aspect is to look at “how” the business incubators work but another part is “why” the entrepreneurs are interested in this type of support and also why business incubators are introduced in this specific context. The raison d’être, what the business incubators are supposed to facilitate, is explained in theory and it may vary depending on context, affiliations etc. However, when talking to the entrepreneurs a different picture emerges.

From the perspective of the business incubation staff, there are too many entrepreneurs with limited understanding and knowledge, both about entrepreneurship but also about what a business incubator is. Entrepreneurs are described as lacking a business mindset without diversifying business ideas, often coming for the cheap office space and infrastructure.

Entrepreneurship is still not considered an attractive alternative for most people in Dar-es- Salaam who are rather forced to start their own businesses to survive. Although attitudes are changing most are more interested in getting employed and the picture of entrepreneurship as being the last solution is painted.

“…if you ask the children they don’t want to become an entrepreneur…” Business incubator staff, #22

In contrast to what the staff of the business incubators aim for their organizations, the cheap office space is the most common answer about the main advantage for the entrepreneurs, here exemplified by two different entrepreneurs

“First thing, it’s a good place to work in, it’s affordable…” Entrepreneur, # 39

and

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Entrepreneur, #41

Although some entrepreneurs mention other things they always bring up the office space and infrastructure as one of the major reasons why they appreciate the business incubator.

The aim of the organizations, mentioned above as reducing youth employment, supporting business development and start-ups is similar to what business incubation theories list as the general purpose. Consequently, that is why business incubators are introduced all over the world in an attempt to reach these goals. However, it may also be interesting to understand a bit more about the ideas behind why this type of organization has been transferred to a new, and rather different context, compared to where they were originally developed. This paper will mainly look into the theories describing spreading of organizational ideas but these reflections from the interviews may be seen as possible complements.

“…the government kind of wants to solve a lot of problems with entrepreneurship and that is happening in the Western world and in the rest of the world, there is a recession and when there is no jobs people tend to realize that “we can help them all to become entrepreneurs” they can create jobs for themselves and that is the solution, and it doesn’t work in all the Western countries either,…,now they say that everyone needs to start living labs, earlier it was science parks…”

Pre-incubator staff, #20

Another interviewee added to the picture with this reply to if foreign organizations working with support of entrepreneurship is helpful

“No, I think the support is good if the idea comes from the people supported, but is it something that comes from you who want to support me the moment you leave, that thing will die, if it’s not my idea I might not know exactly what is required, most of the projects which have been supporting this country died because of a sort of top down approach…”

University representative, #1

In the next section, the three questions of context, how and why business incubators are operating in Dar-es-Salaam will be further discussed and reflected on.

DISCUSSION

This discussion starts with the context of business incubators in Dar-es-Salaam as an attempt to get a better understanding of how the context influences the organizations and the people working there. Then, the operations will be discussed from the perspective of admission and outcome of the business incubators and finally why entrepreneurs are interested in business incubators and if it is possible to describe the ideas behind why such organizations are spread to this new and different context from where it was originally developed.

The specific contextual understanding is in this paper focused on business incubation but also confirmed in previous research on obstacles for small enterprises in Africa (McDade and Spring, 2005). Context is a rather broad and vague concept and embeddedness is utilised to facilitate the understanding of how the social structures are enacted through practical economic actions. A business incubator is an organization which is part of a business system where there are usually other organizations and institutions in the process working with and for entrepreneurs. Examples could be the education system, financial institutions and additional investors later on in the process. As mentioned in the introduction, such institutional frameworks may be lacking and the business incubator becomes embedded in different social and economic structures to where it was developed originally. The interviews also showed that entrepreneurship and economic transactions are influenced by the social and cultural structures. Furthermore, hierarchal structures and relationships between people in the society influence the opportunity to adjust the business incubator to local needs because it may be difficult to make people share their thoughts. Consequently, it becomes important to recognise the embeddedness and the conditions for a business incubator to be adjusted to these

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local prerequisites because it is difficult to have the same expectations on organizations with such different prerequisites. A business incubator with its original structure is therefore possibly a less suitable alternative for entrepreneurship support in this context. The importance of context has been discussed previously in the literature (Maital et al., 2008; Lalkaka, 1997; Henricson and Palmås, 2012; TamÁSy, 2007) and is further confirmed in this paper.

According to the interviewees, the cultural embeddedness also influences how the outcome from the business incubators is discussed. Interviewees shared that this type of discussions were embedded in cultural structures that may be explained by the history of Tanzania which had a long period of socialistic business climate where entrepreneurship and profit making was not encouraged (Pedersen and McCormick, 1999, Temu and Due, 2000, McDade and Spring, 2005). The staff members and managers could not share a lot of information about successful entrepreneurs because the entrepreneurs do not necessarily share their progress. The results and how the operations are run in the business incubators in Dar-es-Salaam are therefore difficult to understand based on the information from the interviews. However, how business incubators are operating may be studied from other perspectives and another aspect of the operations is how entrepreneurs find, or are found by, the business incubators. It turned out that the admission process to the business incubators differed between the organizations. The most common was to use an admission process with certain prerequisites to admit the tenants to the business incubator but there was one organization that stood out. The impression is that this specific business incubator is organised based on how external funders expect it to work. Certain entrepreneurs are chosen and it seems like it is important to create an image of a successful business incubator. Another interview confirmed that there may be more strategic and political reasons behind some of the business incubators which means it becomes more important how they are presented than what the actual result is. The same interviewee also mentioned how entrepreneurship has become a solution for a multitude of problems including high unemployment, inspired by how it has been discussed in the Western world. This has previously been observed in studies of business incubators where the symbolic value of the business incubator becomes the dominating driving force for politicians. There is also a tendency to focus on the successes and ignore the failures in this type of politically charged environment (Hackett and Dilts, 2004). Politicians do not want to appear as backwards and this is also a possible reason why these specific organizations are structured the way they are. Furthermore, these driving forces have previously been discussed as an explanation to why business incubation has spread all over the world (TamÁSy, 2007).

However, if foreign influences are strong regarding establishments of business incubators, based on the theoretical ideas on how they should work, there is a risk of projects as mentioned by one interviewee where the initiative dies as soon as the visitor leaves the country. In combination with the cultural and social embeddedness of respect for senior people and foreigners such business incubator may probably not support the local entrepreneurs. Consequently, it was interesting to find out more about the incentives behind the business incubators and “why” the entrepreneurs had decided to become tenants.

According to the interviewees, the aim of the business incubators primarily focuses on business development through training for the entrepreneurs within marketing and finance etc. Some of the people working within business incubators mention that it is a problem that entrepreneurs come for the cheap office space and that the entrepreneurs do not utilise the service provided in the business incubator. However, one of the major issues for entrepreneurs in Dar-es-Salaam is the lack of infrastructure and office space which makes it less surprising that a cheap office is sometimes more attractive than business advice. Nevertheless, when entrepreneurs in the new context answer that their primary gain from the business incubator is the cheap office space and infrastructure we may not have fully understood “why” business incubation is attractive for the entrepreneurs in the new context.

Finally, would it be possible to further understand “why” business incubators are spread from their original settings to the rest of the world, including Dar-es-Salaam? It may partly be explained from the interviews but will primarily be discussed from a theoretical perspective of institutional theory and Lillrank’s transfer model.

The institutional perspective shows how organizations, through isomorphic change (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), become similar even though it is not necessarily rational for the individual organization, is one explanation for the observed phenomenon in Dar-es-Salaam. If business incubators spread around the world and they are rather similar, this could also explain how

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the typical business incubator ends up in Dar-es-Salaam. Moreover, Lillrank’s transfer model (Lillrank, 1995) facilitates the understanding of demand-and supply-driven processes which are also possible to recognise behind the business incubators. On the one hand the process is demand-driven when entrepreneurship is considered a possible solution to high unemployment and politicians wish to establish a support organization inspired by business incubators in the US to Dar-es-Salaam.

On the other hand, it is supply-driven when it may be influenced by external sources such as researchers, consultants and professionals within the development work community (Sahlin- Andersson, 1996). Those actors emphasise the importance of business incubation and supply the receiver with success stories and theories about how a business incubator works. One issue, as mentioned above, is that as soon as the supplier leaves, the idea is neither anchored, understood or wanted and will immediately die. There are challenges for establishing business incubators based on the specific local conditions such as the institutional frameworks but also history, path dependency and the business climate in general (Gelb et al., 2014). Things like infrastructure and cheap office space are some of the things brought up that are included in business climate.

Another part of the transfer model by Lillrank (1995) discusses the importance of a proper abstraction and application when transferring an organization which emphasises the importance of understanding “why” the organization works the way it works in the context where we find it and “why” it should be applied into the new context. In the case of the business incubator it is necessary to make an abstraction of the organization including details and experience of its functions and management practice, which has previously been analysed as crucial for business incubators (Meru