The uSTART Model: An Evidence-Informed Framework for Designing Business Incubation in Small Island Developing States
This paper proposes the uSTART Model, an evidence-informed framework for designing business incubation programmes in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), using empirical evidence from a Caribbean SIDS. SIDS face distinct constraints: small markets, scarce mentors, thin capital markets and commodity dependence.
The model draws on a three-year longitudinal panel of 106 entrepreneurs in the uSTART incubator at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (2017 to 2019), focus groups with 51 participants and a content analysis of peer-reviewed incubation papers (2001 to 2020). Five design principles are derived through analytic synthesis.
Mentorship dominated across all four outcome models with the largest coefficients in each. Finance partitioned cleanly: predictive on output outcomes, non-significant on capability outcomes. This partition motivates a resource-versus-capability constraint distinction that organises the five design principles: mentorship primacy, developmental sequencing, market orientation from entry, physical co-location as a developmental resource, and adaptive programme duration.
Evidence derives from one Caribbean SIDS; transferability to Pacific and Atlantic, Indian Ocean and South China Sea SIDS is a research question rather than a claim. The three-year window may be insufficient for long-term assessment. The absence of a control group and reliance on self-report measures constrain causal inference. Adaptation to other SIDS contexts will require re-validation.
The framework guides policymakers designing incubation in resource-constrained island economies, positioning mentorship centrally.
To the best of the author's knowledge, this is one of the first incubation design frameworks derived from longitudinal mixed-methods evidence in a Caribbean SIDS, and the first to propose a resource-versus-capability constraint partition as the theoretical organising logic for SIDS incubation design.
Small Island Developing States; Entrepreneurship; Incubator design; Mentorship; Trinidad and Tobago; Business incubation
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The empirical findings on which this framework rests are reported in Meahjohn, I. (2026), "How Business Incubation Dimensions Drive Entrepreneurial Outcomes: Longitudinal Evidence from a Small Island Developing State", Economics and Business Quarterly Reviews, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 126-137, https://doi.org/10.31014/aior.1992.09.01.710.