249 ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION Vol 13, No 4, 2012, pp 249–259 doi: 10.5367/ijei.2012.0092 High-tech entrepreneurial firms in a university-based business incubator Spaces of knowledge, resource heterogeneity and capital formation Fumi Kitagawa and Susan Robertson Abstract: This paper considers the underlying processes and contexts of incubation as critical factors in accelerated firm growth in a university- based technology incubator. At the heart of the study is a concern to understand these dynamics in the early stages of incubation, including processes of firm network formation, the capacity to access and use com- binations of resources at various phases of incubation, and the ways in which the incubator, as a techno-social space, supports the connection of different resources and their relationships. Building on theoretical frame- works that draw on the conceptual work of Lachmann and Bourdieu, the authors argue that it is possible to identify ‘heterogeneous resources’ as different forms of ‘capital’ at work in the incubation process. The empiri- cal case study at a university-based technology incubator illustrates the ways in which university incubators help high-tech start-up firms to build these capabilities through network formation and a variety of types of resource mobilization. Keywords: incubation; university-based technology incubator; networks; capital; resource mobilization Dr Fumi Kitagawa (corresponding author) is a Lecturer in Enterprise Studies at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester M16 6PB, UK. E-mail: fumi.kitagawa@mbs.ac.uk. Professor Susan Robertson is at the ESRC Centre for Learning and Life Chances in the Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES), University of Bristol, Helen Wodehouse Building, 35 Berkley Square, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK. E-mail: s.l.robertson@bristol.ac.uk. Incubators are intended to link technology, resources and know-how to entrepreneurial talent for the purposes of accelerating the development of new companies, and thus speeding up the commercialization of technology (Minshall and Wicksteed, 2005; Markman et al, 2008; Peters et al, 2004). This paper focuses on a technology incubator in a university, which, we argue, acts as a techno-social space in which nascent entrepreneurs learn to build new start-up firms through mobilizing heteroge- neous forms of capital that are then strategically deployed in interorganizational firm behaviours. Specifi- cally, we build on Chiles et al’s (2007) theoretical challenge: that the study of entrepreneurship must include the processes through which entrepreneurs act