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The Brazilian university landscape reveals a decompartmentalization of higher education with regard to society. Offering the promise of a democratization of scholarly knowledge, the diversity of practices nonetheless requires to be examined in detail in order to identify the foundations on which these interventions, which claim to advocate parcipitative social innovation, are based. Among the emblematic experiences of this movement, solidarity incubators are good analysers of the variety of principles on which the links between scientific knowledge and popular knowledge are built. On the basis of the study of these multiform experiments and on the literature devoted to them, the article offers a classification of the activities grouped together under the term Technological Incubators in a Solidarity Economy. Four axes of non-exclusive interventions are identified: incubation as a “university extension”; incubation as a social technology; incubation as a pedagogical act; and incubation as a strategy of territorial development.