The Success Factors of Innovation Hubs — A Comparative Study between District Cleantech and INCUBA Navitas

Details

Supervisors

Gailly, Benoît

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enHave you ever wondered what really makes an innovation hub succeed, beyond glossy policy slogans and impressive buildings, when it is supposed to accelerate an entire regional transition? This thesis investigates that question by taking the innovation hub itself as the primary unit of analysis and asking which success factors matter most in practice, and how stakeholder roles and interactions shape them. Focusing on cleantech, it addresses three gaps in the literature: the broad and unstable definition of innovation hubs, the absence of a consolidated set of success factors for this organizational form, and the limited attention to maturity stages in emerging versus established hubs. Empirically, the research compares District Cleantech in Charleroi, an emerging initiative on a postindustrial brownfield in Wallonia, with INCUBA Navitas in Aarhus, a mature hub integrated with a university-based ecosystem in Denmark. Guided by an interpretivist, abductive design, it relies on semi structured interviews, a ranking exercise used as an elicitation device, and reflexive thematic analysis to reconstruct how governance, territorial anchoring and stakeholder configurations work in each case. The thesis develops an analytical framework that qualifies hubs along eight dimensions and organizes evidence around ten theoretically grounded success factors, then shows how these play out differently across contrasting institutional and maturity contexts. Findings suggest that maturity moderates almost everything else, that orchestration must become institutional before it becomes invisible, that financing cultures cannot simply be imported, and that resource recycling and external networks matter as much for legitimacy as for value creation. If you want to look behind the label and see how two very different hubs actually organize cleantech innovation on the ground, this thesis invites you to read further.