The incubator model – under which new and small businesses are nurtured with access to technology, infrastructure and people in return for shares or a periodic fee – has existed since at least the 1950s.

However, since the digital revolution, a huge number of startups have stood to profit greatly from having access to almost identical resources and technologies, as well as contact with similar mentors and training. 

Enter the tech incubator, whose popularity and success first peaked during the internet revolution of the late 1980s and 90s, then again during the social media revolution beginning in about 2005 and lasting up to the present day.

But incubators may not always be a good thing for startups. Like almost all successful business models, the incubator paradigm has been over-repeated, badly transplanted and, in some cases, even exploited.

Simply put, though the incubator’s desired output is successful businesses, it remains itself a business – profit-orientated and, ultimately, self-interested. 

This in itself isn’t a bad thing. The best incubators, like Y Combinator and Tech Stars, are able to churn out successful businesses in an almost conveyor belt-like fashion whilst simultaneously making respectable profits.

However, the upshot of the increase in demand for incubators is an equal increase in the number of less able, and even less well-intentioned, organisations coming in to hoover up the excess – to make a quick buck off the hype rather than making money in a sustainable, responsible way.

So how do you make sure that you steer clear of these more dubious types?

In short, reputation. The very best incubators are so well known that they can afford to accept less than one percent of hopeful applicants. Of course, not every startup can hope to get into one of these elite organisations; but still, a brief flick through any potentially suitable incubator’s portfolio will help to clarify just what they’re capable of and what they’ve achieved to date.

But whilst it may be the case that the market for “traditional” tech incubators is oversaturated, this is hardly the case for their “non-traditional” brethren. 

Particularly interesting is the potential for business incubation in non-Western markets. The biggest of these is, of course, the rapidly expanding Russian digital market. Since 2001, internet use in Russia has risen from five percent to a whopping 59 percent! That’s an amazing expansion, and the figure is set to rise yet.

Fast Lane Ventures, a developer of internet companies founded in 2010, grabbed this opportunity with both hands, and were rewarded with investments worth over 40 million euros in 2011 alone. Their impressive portfolio testifies to the worthiness such high investments.

And similarly, the German based incubator Rocket Internet has gone from strength to strength by developing, re-inventing and implementing digital concepts successful in the West (including Facebook, LinkedIn and Groupon) in the developing world, as well as supporting startups (both Western and non-Western) of their own.

So there is clearly still potential in incubator model, though the most interesting things may be happening were you perhaps wouldn’t have expected.