Blogs

The business media is not fulfilling its historic obligation to frame the national economic debate in the most informed manner. Instead, it is meekly following the lead of the economics profession, which is completely lost. It has been three years as of June that the economy came out of a so-called recession. Yet over those three years, we have not had a return to acceptable levels of employment. Millions of Americans still face foreclosure and suffer from an absence of health care. So millions of Americans are being marginalized in the most brutal economic fashion.

--Austin
Technology Incubator, University of Texas. http://ati.utexas.edu. This is one of
the nation’s pre-eminent incubators.[i]
It has helped create both Dell Computer and Whole Foods, for example.
Altogether, ATI has helped over 200 companies
raise more than $750 million. Its director is Isaac Barchas.

Here
are mini-profiles of three incubators, in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and
recommendations for three others that should be examined further in Texas, Colorado
and Oregon. I do not recommend incubators in Irvine, Ca., and Albany, N.Y., for
reasons that will be cited.

There appear to
be at least four critical challenges facing incubators:

3a. Improving management of
incubators. It’s widely
agreed that the ingredients of successful incubation include:

--Providing
physical space, utilities and Internet access on a cost-advantaged basis;

--Business plan
writing and development;

--Management
advice, including introductions to other members of a management team;

--Networking,
mentoring and coaching;

--Technical
assistance and prototyping;

The National Business Incubator Association, based in Athens, Ohio, is the key industry association (www.nbia.org) and they have provided these statistics: