Definition of "incubator"

incubator

/ˈɪn.kjuːˌbeɪ.tə(ɹ)/

noun
plural incubators
1. (chemistry) Any apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a reaction.
2. (medicine) An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a newborn baby.
3. An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for the hatching of eggs.
4. A place to maintain the culturing of bacteria at a steady temperature.
5. (business) A support programme for the development of entrepreneurial companies.
  Quotations
  So the question that is commonly asked is, why put a media incubator in a media desert and have it managed by a civil servant? This gets to the heart of the institutional support problem in Wales.
  2006, Philip N. Cooke, Creative Industries in Wales: Potential and Pitfalls, page 34
  Tech City is very big on "incubators" – places where startups are supposed to grow out of a collection of adjacent desks in a huge barracks of other adjacent desks – and on luring big firms to the East End of London.
  2014 March 10, Cory Doctorow, “The slow death of Silicon Roundabout”, in The Guardian‎