Incubating in rural North America: Successful programs in small communities
Rural incubation programs face unique challenges, but many rural incubators provide clients with top-notch business assistance while balancing their budgets. NBIA will soon publish a book describing how rural incubation programs integrate incubation management practices to best serve client companies even with limited resources and small staffs. This article highlights a cross section of those programs and their management practices.

NBIA's new CEO talks about the future of business incubation
In mid-February, NBIA’s board of directors named Jasper Welch of Durango, Colo., the organization’s new president and CEO. He is the third person to hold that post in the association’s 28-year history. He has also been an NBIA member, having served as director of the San Juan College Enterprise Center in Farmington, N.M., for a dozen years beginning in 1999. He is co-founder of a coworking space in Durango, a serial entrepreneur and a former elected official. Soon after his appointment as NBIA CEO, he took time to talk with the NBIA Review and answer a few questions.

SSIC: Serving entrepreneurs and strengthening communities
In an early 20th-century building that has been a movie theater, a bowling alley, a carpet display room and a warehouse, the South Side Innovation Center of Syracuse, N.Y., creates businesses in an area where there was once little business and even less hope. The program considers anyone who asks for business assistance a client, so each year, the incubator’s three full-time and two part-time staff work with hundreds of nonresident clients in addition to its resident clients. As a result, SSIC has had a remarkable impact on the downtrodden south side of the Empire State’s fifth-largest city.

Ohio incubator embraces international agreements
According to Akron Global Accelerator’s recently retired CEO Michael LeHere, how incubators structure international relationships varies with every situation depending on the community, the capacity and the companies’ foci. The man speaks from experience; Akron Global started incubating companies in 1983 and has established international bridges around the globe, including China, Germany, Israel and Finland.

SMBI requires clients to prove themselves annually
Companies selected for residence in the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator at the University of Florida in Alachua, Fla., have cleared a hurdle – but it’s a challenge they will face each year they remain in the program.

That’s because every year, client companies at the incubator must do much the same thing all over again – demonstrate that they and the incubator are right for each other.

“Of all the practices we have here, the one I like the best is when we review a company and license space to them, a company is given 12 months; at the end of that period, they go before a review committee,” says Patti Breedlove, associate director of the program. “They go through the same process they did on entry. Every single year.”

Boston – a city of innovators
Writing in 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the Massachusetts State House as “the hub of the solar system.” While that may or may not have been true, over the years the part about the solar system got dropped, and the remaining part – “the hub” – came to refer not just to the State House, or even its tony Beacon Hill neighborhood, but to all of Boston itself. Founded in 1630, Boston quickly became the leading seaport in the northeastern United States. Much of the commerce between the Old World and the New World passed through the East Coast city.

From its earliest days, Boston has been a leading hub of innovation, an international business and shipping center, and the locus of vast commerce originating or ending up almost anywhere in the world. If anything, it is more so today than ever before.

Be a strong business incubation advocate
Throughout its history, NBIA has worked to raise awareness about the important role business incubation programs play in helping start-up and emerging companies become more successful. As part of this process, the organization spreads the word about the industry’s accomplishments to policymakers, the media, related organizations and others on a national level.

But you, our members, also play an important role in NBIA’s advocacy efforts. We need your help to ensure that local and regional stakeholders understand how incubation programs help create jobs, stimulate economies, commercialize technologies and generally contribute to a region’s economic prosperity.