106D. Hjalmarsson

Focus on Favorable Conditions

The ambition to provide favorable institutional conditions may from the local perspective serve as a kind of rationale or program theory for the efforts made by the incubators when they create meeting places and creative arenas. They actively produce favorable conditions, a kind of free and thick market, to allow for entrepreneurial judgments locally and regionally.

Incubators and innovation offices offer “commons,” to use a concept from Sölvell’s (2015) Construction of the Cluster Commons. The basic idea is that commons provide an arena in which entrepreneurs can meet potential customers and business partners and have an opportunity to find what Lachmann (1986) defines as “unthought-of information.” Thus, a significant part of the resources within the innovation support system is used to design these kinds of creative environments or local markets; everything from the annual Umeå Tech Arena event to seminars and courses for researchers and doctoral students: The Social Innovation Hub, Summer Verification, Innovation Boot Camp, Startup Coffee, Summer eXpression, and much more. In principle, a public support program theory could then be based on an