During the last twenty years there has been a concentrated efforts made by the Israeli government to support and develop the high-tech industry. Among other means, a prominent place is kept for the Technological Incubator Program, which was established in 1991. The technological incubators are supportive frameworks, which help initiators in their first steps to develop and turn their new technological ideas into market products. Recently we witness the access of private capital to this field, which expressed in the setting up of private incubators.
The principal objective of this study is to evaluate the public technological incubator program in an era of privatization. With the private sector taking a role in the technological incubators market, it is the right time to check the necessity of the public program and its efficiency from a comparative point of view.
The main finding of this study is that the private incubators cannot, at this point, take over and be a full substitute to the public incubators, but many aspects of their economic behavior can be used as an example to proper management. The greatest advantage of the public program lies in its ability to actualize high-risk projects, projects that during their seed stages are being grasped as non-attractive ones. The public technological incubator program was also found to be the only answer to ideological and national objectives such as the geographical distribution, which includes rural and peripheral areas and the special incentives given to population that otherwise, such activities, would be out of reach for them.
