Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you use a lot of volunteer mentors?

Ken: Yes. Our mentor profiling is I’ll work for fame and feeling good or I’ll work for fortune.

If you want to work for fortune, then you want to eventually get paid, or you’ll take equity. We’re letting our mentors profile and say, “I’m looking for a small company. I really want to mentor and help. But I want a stake in it. I want some equity. I’m doing this as a semiretired professional, and I want to get paid for my services.”

Or, “I’m doing this because I believe it has social and community value.” They have options of defining how they’re willing to mentor. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ken: I wish you could interview all of our ribbon partners. We have work going on in Cadillac, Michigan, in Claire, Michigan, in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, in Marlette, Michigan. Some of these are pretty small towns. We’ve got groups supporting small businesses, bringing them what we believe are cutting-edge technologies and access to capital. >>>

Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Dr. Tom O’Neal, Executive Director, University of Central Florida’s Business Incubation Program — Orlando, Florida (Part 4)

By guest author Irina Patterson and Mridula Velagapudi

Irina: Do you have any special initiatives at the moment?

Tom: We try to team up with different organizations to do stuff. We’ve got a contract with the Department of Energy to put together this “MegaWatt Ventures” program. >>>

AngelList, CapLinked, And Financing Marketplaces

AngelList has been generating  a lot of buzz recently. Today, Business Insider has a piece claiming that they are scaring VCs to death. Really? I have a hard time believing that! In any case, I thought this would be a good time to give readers my perspective on AngelList, as well as other fund raising services that are coming into the market like CapLinked, which has recently raised money from star investors like Peter Thiel. Other related services are SecondMarket, Kickstarter, ProFounder and Invested.In, the latter three specifically focused on crowd funding (not CapLinked’s approach), while the first is more of a brokerage.

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1M/1M: VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What WE Do With Your Rejects

Last week I wrote the post VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? following which I had a number of significant private discussions which I curate here for the benefit of others who have the same kinds of questions. Overall, I think it will help the ecosystem better understand how we simply supplement existing resources and add value. Existing resources include incubators, accelerators, financing marketplaces like AngelList, and of course VCs and angels. >>>

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 the characteristics of an entrepreneur and are willing to take it on and learn a lot and work hard. >>>

Entrepreneurship Education: Why Do Business Incubators Fail?

While my previous post on entrepreneurship education, Bootstrapping at B-Schools is still generating hot discussion, I would like to pose another important discussion topic: Why do business incubators fail?

Those among my readers who have perspective and analysis to offer on the subject, please feel free to jump right in.

[Please note that since this discussion started here on the blog in 2010, we have launched the One Million by One Million global initiative, and for incubators looking for a viable business model, you are very welcome to reach out to us to become a partner of our program.]