Although the importance of the incubator mangers for successful incubation has been widely discussed (Hansen et al. 2000; Mian 1996; Rice 2002; Sá & Lee 2012; Scillitoe & Chakrabarti 2010), there is little systematic empirical evidence on how the incubator mangers leverage various resources and contribute to incubation success. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by applying the theory of strategic niche management (SNM) into the incubation situation and investigating the extent to which the incubator managers act as the niche manager in incubators. More specifically, we attempted to evaluate the influence of expectations, networks, and learning constructed by the incubator mangers on the incubator performance. The empirical evidence focuses on national technology business incubators (NTBIs) from 2008 to 2012 in China, a country had ranked only second to the United States in the world in terms of the number of TBIs by the end of 2007 (MOST 2007).