Management Control Systems in Post- incubation of High-Technology Start-ups

Business incubation is offered to high-technology start-ups if they have a promising idea for founding a company or have already founded a company. A business incubation centre may be defined as an organization that facilitates the process of creating successful new small enterprises by providing them with a comprehensive and integrated range of services. Those services should compensate the early-stage resource deficits to ensure stability, sustainable economic growth and long-term business survival of the incubated start-up. In Austria there exist incubators from companies as well as private and public incubators, which this study focuses on. The public incubator in Austria is a so called AplusB (Academia plus Business)- incubator, which was founded in 2002. It exists of eight AplusB-centers spread over Austria, which are integrated in the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. 438 founding projects have been nurtured by AplusB-centers since 2002, and 349 companies have been founded. The services offered during business incubation are to support the companies in coaching, qualification, networking, financing and infrastructure. In Austria incubation time lasts between 1.5 and 2 years. After start-ups graduate from the incubator, the period of post-incubation, which is a synonym for post-graduation, starts. There is a high risk of failure in post-incubation. Evaluation results from AplusB programs state that particularly the first years after graduating from the incubator are critical. This dissertation aims to investigate the following aspect addressed by literature. Post-incubation has not often been explored and most of the studies only consider tenants survival rates. The support-specific factors that actually determine the probability of survival/failure after the graduation are unknown. Especially it is unknown how management control systems influence start-ups in post- incubation. A management control system is a means of gathering and using information to aid and coordinate the planning and control decisions throughout an organization and to guide the behavior of its managers and other employees. Therefore one research question is which and how management control systems are used in post-incubation of high-technology start-ups? And do successful, respectively failed start-ups agree on which (and how) management control systems are used in post- incubation of high- technology start-ups? The method will be done based on qualitative interviews for certain start-ups (case studies). The testing sample exist of successful/unsuccessful ex-incubated companies and the companies also depend on the time they left from the incubator. Regarding the management control systems the interviews are based on the model described by Simons where he defines four different management control systems (belief system, boundary diagnostic control system, interactive system) which influence the business strategy of a company.