An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Are there any other metrics that you measure? Debera: No, just whether [the companies are] able to shift from needing the support of the incubator to being their own companies. That’s our goal, basically, that they’re launched and they’re successful.

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What other business development tools do you use? Debera: There are lots of tools for developing business plans. We use those. That’s fairly structured. Then, around [such tools] is the fairly chaotic experience of the other people in the incubator as well as all the mentors

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An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How many companies were funded by angels during their incubation period? Debera: At this point, Sam Cochran, [the CEO of SMIT, which runs] the Solar Ivy company got about $250,000 in angel funding. The other companies are less needy, less technology based. They’re not actually looking

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An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How many companies have you incubated since inception? Debera: Up until now, we’ve been involved with 20. We just brought in four new companies. The fourth will be coming in March. Of those, 16 are still in business.

An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Can students apply to your incubator? Debera: They cannot be students. They have to have graduated. I don’t want to interfere with their education. So, we take people either when they’ve just graduated, who we feel have the ability and are energized and smart and have

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An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Today I am talking to Debera Johnson, founder and executive director of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation. The incubator is a part of the Center for Sustainable Design Studies at Pratt Institute, which is an art, design, and architecture college in New York City.  Since

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