BIT Center and YES Incubator are established in October 2005 and June 2007, respectively. Both Incubators developed organizational and service structure and made significant improvement in developing small and medium enterprises, while creating success stories in their countries. It is recognized as a need to develop a methodology for measuring performances of Incubator and Incubator clients as well determining the level of entrepreneurship development.

In the same time, more and more innovative centers (business incubators, technology parks and centers, business start-up centers etc.) have been established in the region. However there is a lack of evidence about their economic impact in the society as well as comparison model and benchmarks that could be used as guidelines for the policymakers. This creates a need for having unified methodology and tool for measuring the level of entrepreneurship development.

This project needs to examine factors like jobs created by incubator, client companies in incubators and graduated companies, product innovation, number of business and start ups, success rates of incubator firms, and impact on economic development and local community. One difficulty involved in this evaluation is that innovative centers have been established by both public and private entities, with different objectives. Their success was often evaluated on the basis of different, non-unified variables that resulted in non-unified methodologies that is hard to compare and use as regional benchmarks.

The outcome of the project is going to be a generated report for the local and central government, universities and donors. The reports will be used for elaborating the situation in youth entrepreneurship in the EU and South Eastern Europe countries, the role of business incubators and innovation and technological parks, self-employment as an alternative for the take-job mentality, promotion of creativity and innovation, as well as the business environment with reference to cultural diversity.

This project will contribute in improving the entrepreneurial culture through Incubators performances (efficiency and effectiveness, Incubator Clients outcomes) as well as raising awareness among relevant stakeholders for boosting the job creation and increasing the number of young people that are interested to establish own company.

The partners will communicate and cooperate with all business incubators in the South East Europe that is willing to be a part of this project. It is very important to have a significant number of different incubators from the region for this project. Working with different incubators will help team to have applicable report at the end that can be used in the innovative infrastructures as well as for the policymakers within those countries. The ultimate goal will be creating effective partnerships among businesses that are part of the Incubators, municipalities and the public sector in order to promote sustainable regional development.