New research published: designing business incubation for small island economies

By Dr. Inshan Meahjohn | Founder and CEO, DAG (Digital Alliance Global Group)

My latest peer-reviewed article has been published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, a Q1 Emerald journal with an acceptance rate of 8.3 percent. The paper is titled "The uSTART model: an evidence-informed framework for designing business incubation in small island developing states".

The question behind the paper is a practical one. Most incubation frameworks were designed for large economies with deep markets, dense investor networks and thick talent pools. Small island developing states have none of these at scale, yet they run incubators built on borrowed blueprints. The paper asks what an incubator should look like when it is designed for a small economy from the start, rather than adapted to one after the fact.

The evidence base is a three-year panel study of 106 entrepreneurs who passed through the uSTART incubator in Trinidad and Tobago, focus groups with 51 participants, and a structured analysis of two decades of incubation research. Across the panel, mentorship was the strongest and most consistent predictor of entrepreneurial capability. Access to finance mattered for output, but it did not build capability on its own.

From that evidence the paper derives five design principles: place mentorship at the centre of resource allocation, build capability before deploying capital, orient ventures toward export markets from entry, treat physical co-location as a developmental resource rather than cheap rent, and graduate ventures on milestones rather than fixed timetables.

Readers who follow my work on cybersecurity and digital governance will recognise the underlying theme. Budgets and tools do not create capability. People who know how to use them do. That holds for a startup in an incubator and for a board building a security programme.

The article is available at https://doi.org/10.1108/JEEE-03-2026-0305. A full list of my research is at inshanmeahjohn.com/published-research.