As a special organization serving start-up firms, incubators should build their core competence to meet the needs of the incubated firms and promoting the growth of them, finally to realize the development of the incubators themselves. This paper takes Apluslabs, a typical incubator in the field of intelligent manufacturing, as the research object, to conduct a case study. It is found that the specific incubation needs of intelligent manufacturing start-ups mainly occur in the engineering stage, including market docking, resource supporting and production planning. According to the needs of incubated firms, Apluslabs has gradually developed a set of corresponding engineering core competence, including engineering perception capability, engineering utilization capability and engineering reconfiguration capability. This paper further analyzes the mechanism and process of the construction of these engineering capabilities. This study introduces core competence theory into the business incubation research, which has reference value for the business incubation of intelligent manufacturing.