A Methodological Investigation of Design and Mentoring Processes in Start-Up Incubation

Purpose Incubators have long been relevant actors in the development of start-ups. This paper proposes studying mentoring in incubators as a decision aiding process that aids a specific design process, namely the activities of a start-up during incubation. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, this paper assumes a parallelism between mentoring and decision aiding, as well as between business modelling and a design process. According to this approach, mentors are viewed as decision aiding actors who operate within Contexts of Action and adopt more or less appropriate tools to aid business modelling design activities. A protocol analysis was carried out on 86 mentoring sessions with 53 entrepreneurial teams at the I3P Incubator of the Politecnico di Torino. Findings The study allowed us to obtain a deep understanding of the mentoring activities and the appropriateness of the tools used in each phase of the incubation process. Originality This paper introduces five elements of novelty. First, it looks at business mentoring as a decision aiding process of a design process, specifically the incubation process; second, this has allowed us to refer to a framework provided by the Decision Aiding literature; third, it adopts an alternative research approach to surveys, questionnaires and interviews; fourth, it provides an abstract/standardised unit of analysis to describe the situational nature of mentoring. Finally, it identifies the building blocks of mentoring and how the activities are methodologically conducted.