What to Expect From an Incubator

By Jim Flowers

When Marty Zwilling invited me to comment on business incubation, I was both flattered and excited. Then I realized that he had handed me a serious challenge. At least I decided to address it as such. This was my chance to think it all through one more time, and then to expose myself to possible criticism by making some bold assertions.

Oh, well, what's entrepreneurship all about, if not risk? Here is what I think an entrepreneur should expect from an incubator. In fact, it is what she should demand.

Relationships.

That's it. One word. Relationships. Everything else is trivial - useful, but trivial.

By far, the majority of people that I meet tend to think of an incubator as a place. That makes sense. Most incubators are brick-and-mortar symbols of their community's commitment to employment growth. Fill the incubator building. Graduate some companies. Jobs will obviously be created. And you can see a building. You can't see a program. And you certainly can't see relationships.

But the building, the discounted floor space with a few office amenities, has little to do with the ultimate success or failure of the businesses that live there. That has been noticed, by the way. That's why Marty recently blogged about good incubators having strong managers. I'm willing to bet that any incubator manager considered "strong" is a great practitioner of networking.

I often call upon the automobile metaphor to describe certain aspects of company operation. In this model, the entrepreneur is the gasoline. Her Moxie (Forgive my shameless branding.) is the motive force behind the entire vehicle. Professional and administrative services of various sorts provide the oil that protects the engine from overheating, seizing up, and so on. They offer risk reduction.

They can't make the company go, but their absence can sure make it stop. I'm stretching the metaphor, but please consider the notion that industry relationships are like Doppler Radar. Because they include powerful, experience-tempered interpretive components, they can help the entrepreneur distinguish between clouds and rain, between blips and trends, between serious threats and mere annoyances, between trustworthy allies and slick operators.

Boiling incubator value down to relationships does demand two important presumptions. It presumes first that the entrepreneur has selected an appropriate market opportunity, and second, that she plans to address that opportunity in a unique, powerful, and direct manner.

These presumptions seem reasonable, since most incubators do screen prospective clients in some fashion. Accepted clients then commonly rent space, and most landlords prefer that tenants manage to pay their rent. Successful strategies permit timely rent payment. Incubators also prefer that their clients ultimately graduate; and that typically requires a pretty good set of core strategies as well.

So, at VT KnowledgeWorks in Blacksburg, Virginia, we screen prospective clients for their Market opportunity, for the Magic that they offer to their prospective customers, and for the Moxie displayed by the start-up team. We reasonably assure that they have oil for their engines, in the form of logistical, administrative, and professional support services that reduce their risk.

Then we do our very best to make sure that they build a broad set of relationships that will be continuing sources of interpreted information, that they have a full complement of Mentors to assist them as they make tough decisions.

Entrepreneurs: demand an incubator that delivers systematic, structured, relentless building of relationships - the pursuit of the interpreted information that can be provided to incubated companies by trusted people with special knowledge. Everything else is trivial.

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Today's guest blog is by Jim Flowers, a forty-year veteran of technology-based start-ups, Director of the VT KnowledgeWorks Business Acceleration Center (www.vtknowledgeworks.com) at Virginia Tech, President of the Virginia Business Incubation Association (www.vbia.org), and author of "MOXIE and other fundamental entrepreneurial concepts" (available from Amazon.com). He blogs at www.startwithmoxie.com.