NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Business incubator

Business incubators are organizations that support the entrepreneurial process, helping to increase survival rates for innovative startup companies. Only entrepreneurs with feasible projects are admitted into the incubators, where they are offered a specialized menu of support resources and services. The resources and services open to an entrepreneur include: provision of physical space, management coaching, help in making an effective business plan, administrative services, technical support, business networking, advice on intellectual property and sources of financing. The incubation process is intended to last around 2-5 years. (1) Startup (or start-up, aka System startup) refers to the short period of time, or system state a computer is in, immediately after switching it on. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A business plan is a summary of how a business owner, manager, or entrepreneur intends to organize an entrepreneurial endeavor and implement activities necessary and sufficient for the venture to succeed. ... In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form. ...

Business incubators can be private or public. Private incubators are for-profit firms that take equity or receive a fee for the business services they provide to their clients. In essence, they are a consulting firm that is specialized in new firm creation. In the last twenty years, many developed and developing countries have started large systems of public business incubators to encourage and assist entrepreneurship. In many cases, public incubators are designed to stimulate the development of new products and services in high-tech industries. For science-based business incubators, an effective collaboration with universities and research institutions is essential to motivate researchers into taking the risk of initiating a company. Management consulting (sometimes also called strategy consulting) refers to both the practice of helping companies to improve performance through analysis of existing business problems and development of future plans, as well as to the firms that specialize in this sort of consulting. ... Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities. ... High tech refers to tech that is at the cutting-edge - the most high tech currently available. ... A university is an institution of higher education and of research, which grants academic degrees. ...

Incubators have many partners in addition to universities. Since new firms require finance to grow, incubators have close relationships with many kinds of investors. Seed capital and venture capital funds, business angels, and banks provide most of the seed and start-up capital for incubated companies. Since business incubators are powerful economic development tools, they collaborate actively with regional and national government agencies, from which they often receive financial grants. In many countries, business incubators have national associations to represent their interests and organize meetings where best practices are disseminated. Finance studies and addresses the ways in which individuals, businesses and organizations raise, allocate and use monetary resources over time, taking into account the risks entailed in their projects. ... Venture capital is a general term to describe financing for startup and early stage businesses as well as businesses in turn around situations. ... Iain Banks is a Scottish-born writer of both mainstream and science fiction novels. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The term best practice generally refers to the best possible way of doing something; it is used in the fields of business management, software engineering, and medicine. ...

Retail Incubators are rare, and there are few success stories nationally. For example, Akron Ohio, and Wilimington, Delaware have successful incubators. Chuck D'Aprix(Charles D'Aprix) started and managed an urban retail incubator in Quincy, Massachusetts in the mid-1990's. D'Aprix, trained by the National Business Incubator Association(NBIA), applied traditional incubator techniques but in essence created "an incubator without walls."(Sout Shore Patriot LegerFebrury 8, 1994). Moeovoer, D'Aprix saw the need to fund the busineses, something that many traditional incubators do not do(NBIA) and as such he established a $5 miilion dollar loan pool funded by banks from Greater Boston((/10/1994). Patriot Ledger(and former Boston Globe columnist) Ian Menzies praised the incubator in an op-ed column on October 27, 1994 in the Patriot Ledger(a daily newspaper serving Boston's South Shore). The loan pool received attention as well from the Boston Globe and the Quincy Sun(a local Quincy paper on September 22, 1994). Currently retail incubator management start-up advice can be found on downtownprojcet.com. D'Aprix was asked to explain the mechanics of the incubator before the then Northeast Industrial Deveolpers Association(October 1994 annual meeting. The retail incubator in Quincy eventually ended after D'Aprix's departure , once again underscoring the difficulty of sustaining such incubators.

It is important to note that many downtown retail incubators have a high failure rate(NBIA) and that many specialize in a paticular product line in order to increase chances of success. Meanwhile Charles D'Aprix has been retained as a consultant by the think-tank CEOS for CITIES(ceosforcities.org) to examine the role of entrepreneurship in commercial district revitalization.

Evaluations of business incubators in Europe and the U.S. suggest that 90% of incubated startups were active and growing after three years of operation, which is a much higher success rate than that observed in startups launched without assistance. Science-based business incubators are thought to be particularly useful from a policy perspective because they can simultaneously promote knowledge diffusion, technology transfer and high-tech firm creation. Technology transfer is the process of developing practical applications for the results of scientific research. ...