Business incubators constitute a unique context where entrepreneurs and new firms can develop and be supported through incubator activities and processes, with potential for enhancing sustainability both in economic, environmental and social terms (Fonseca and Chiappetta Jabbour 2012). Incubators may focus on sustainability in several different ways, e.g., through a narrower focus such as supporting the development of sustainable business models (Bocken et al. 2014) or a broader ‘greening’ mission such as improvement of environmental performance of firms regardless of their focus and industry (Fuchs and Mazmanian 1998).

In a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem business incubators might play a vital role (Mian 1997; Bank et al. 2017), however, only a limited number of studies have explored this aspect of incubators up to this point, e.g., Potts (2010) and Fonseca and Chiappetta Jabbour (2012). Since incubators harbour firms in early development stages, they have a considerable potential for influencing their tenants and enhancing their sustainability, and this potential might currently be underutilised (Fichter et al. 2016; Bank and Kanda 2016). The following chapter aims to provide an overview of how incubators deal with sustainability-related aspects in their mission of supporting new venture tenants. This is done through a survey study of 96 incubators in three European countries that were among top-five countries in European Union’s Eco-Innovation Scoreboard for 2016: Finland, Germany, and Sweden (Giljum et al. 2017).

A particular interest is devoted to the issues of to what extent and how do incubators integrate sustainability aspects when recruiting tenants and supporting development processes of emerging businesses. This study takes an explorative approach where our survey has been sent out to all incubators in the three selected countries regardless of their focus. This gives us the opportunity to study how sustainability of new ventures can be enhanced within entrepreneurial ecosystems through the function of incubators.