A couple of years ago, Andrea Boehmert, now co-managing partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa, asked tenants at the Bandwidth Barn what they needed most: start-up capital or business support? Almost all of them said that they needed business support. “If you gave them money, most of them wouldn’t know what to do with it,” she says. “Particularly in the IT industry where very few understand business.”

In an environment where 80 percent of all start-ups fail, business incubators are being proclaimed as the start-up entrepreneur’s saviour. Designed to accelerate start-ups during their early years, incubators generally provide business support and services, rather than cash, in the first two to three years of a company’s growth. The real success, says Boehmert, is when you see businesses graduating out of the incubators and going out on their own.