Since start-ups enterprises often have more room and flexibility for sustainability ideas in the early stages of business development incubators could be particularly important for introducing and developing sustainability thinking. Previous studies on incubators and the incubation processes in general are rather extensive in the literature. However, there are few studies particularly focusing on sustainability dimensions of incubators. In particular how incubators recruit and support start-ups in incorporating sustainability thinking into their core business idea or making their sustainability-oriented idea even more successful has received few research attention. With this gap identified in research and societal need for sustainability, research on green incubators is of timely interest. The latest report from the IPCC on climate change problem warns about the demand of sustainable business creation, which is critical to promote sustainable development. Entrepreneurship is at the heart of sustainable growth (Carayannis and Von Zedtwitz, 2005) and in that sense it is in the heart of sustainability development. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to investigate empirically the recruiting criteria of start-ups by three sustainability oriented incubators in Sweden, Finland and Germany in order to understand how they support sustainable entrepreneurship and eco-innovation.

Following a literature review on “conventional” incubators, a sample incubator that works with sustainable start-ups in each country was chosen and studied by help of interviews with managers, stakeholders, tenants and managers at incubators in order to investigate deficits and potentials of the existing incubator support systems for sustainable entrepreneurship and eco innovation. The data used in the study comes from Green Tech Park (Sweden), LADEC (Finland) and Green Garage (Germany).

From this study, our major implications are that, the studied incubators on average have an ambition to recruit and develop sustainability oriented start-ups, but a critical mass of such tenants is vital if any such ambitions are to become a reality. This critical mass of start-ups is very much influenced by the local context of the incubator, which generates both potential tenants and resources to support such firms in sustainability entrepreneurship and eco innovation. For incubator management, this suggests an active search for tenants interested in sustainable entrepreneurship and providing support focused on such activities.