Abstract
This dissertation focuses on incubators, which are structures designed to support entrepreneurs by offering an array of resources and services that additionally complicate the business support activity. The complexity is amplified by a high variety of incubators, resulting in the difficulty of defining an appropriate performance measurement. The issue of adaptation or not of this measurement is thereupon constantly questioned. In response, the configurational approach is taken into account and allows to identify five ideal incubator configurations. It is suggested to use the balanced scorecard to accommodate the performance measurement to every single of these five ideal configurations. This suggestion is verified through a procedure of research-intervention based on two stages. The first stage involves a quantitative study analyzing the relevance of the balanced scorecard in this specific context, arising out of an online survey answered by 109 incubator managers. The collected data is subject of a descriptive analysis, in order to obtain a general framework of the balanced scorecard. The second stage consists in an experiment of this generic framework within five incubators. Each of them approaches a different ideal configuration. This experiment confirms the importance of the balanced scorecard in our research context. This tool furnishes a more reliable and stable measurement as a result of a selected and synthesized information. However, this experiment proves that an exemplary model of the balanced scorecard cannot be used in the different incubator configurations: an adaptation is consistently needed. This dissertation demonstrates that each incubator configuration implies specific as well as generic indicators, in order to supply a proper performance measurement.