We introduce incubators as an organizational form intended to facilitate entrepreneurship. The theorizing and research on incubators have been primarily anchored in market failure perspective and carry over the assumptions about a free market economy, mostly implicitly into the empirical work. This ignores the influence of the institutional context and obscures processes that may come into play in emerging economies like India. Using Scott's model (2008) of institutional context, we argue how the institutional context provides a complementary perspective that may reveal a richer picture of incubator operation in emerging economies. We illustrate this in the case of academic incubators in India.
