incubator

Any apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a reaction.

An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a newborn baby.

An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for the hatching of eggs.

A place to maintain the culturing of bacteria at a steady temperature.

A support programme for the development of entrepreneurial companies.

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.

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.