Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many inquiries do you receive a month?

Jerry: I get two or three a week.

Irina: Out of those, how many do you usually accept?

Jerry: That’s a very good question. It’s a cyclical thing. Typically, 50% of them are people who will say, “I like the idea. I’ll be back in six months, as soon as I get funding.” Some people say, “We’re ready right now.” I would say that 60% of all companies I talk to come in at some point, either immediately or sometime over the year. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: How many of your entrepreneurs work on software businesses? And what kind of software?

Tim: It would be probably about 50% of our companies, either half or just under half. A lot of people want to hook on to enterprise software programs. Many are interested in social networking, data mining, and Web development. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Jerry: When we hire students at the incubator, the university pays the students weekly, and then I bill the company and they reimburse the university for the students’ services.

Irina: How are the faculty compensated?

Jerry: It’s up to them. It could be free. It could be whatever it is. A lot of them, because they’re looking for student programs, could [do it as] a pro bono kind of thing. They could work together that way. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Tim: We had other ways of doing our Japanese program. We could have gone there. There are other ways of doing that, but that is the way they wanted to do it. They really wanted to see the environment here, which was great, but it wound up being costly. As I said, they did it for three years. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies have been incubated since 1988?

Jerry: I wouldn’t know. I presently have 95 companies in my center. We are the largest technology center in the country, to the best of my knowledge. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: What are your metrics for success? What do you measure?

Tim: One of the things we measure is graduation. We try to track our companies, we can’t do it. It is very hard and very expensive. But we have had Northwestern faculty track companies in the incubator just after they leave, after five years, and after 15 years to try to identify what they call the incubator effect.

So, we have collected a lot of data. We have to, as I said, survey our companies, at least those that stay in Evanston, every year. We had 25 last year and 470 jobs created. We monitor job creation.

We monitor how much square footage they have under our lease because that is a rough way of measuring their impact on the occupancy rate in the buildings in downtown. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

I am talking to Jerry Creighton, executive director of the Enterprise Development Center at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).  Based in Newark, New Jersey, the center is home to nearly 86 high-tech and life sciences companies. The center’s entrepreneurs have access to the institute’s facilities and can partner with researchers to help grow their business. EDC is also in the heart of Newark’s University Heights Science Park and the Newark Innovation Zone. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: Would you give us an example of service providers that come to your incubator?

Tim: We have people who made a living for a couple of years doing programming for various of our companies. You come in, you are doing C++ or something like that, you work with one of our companies and they say, Look this guy picked up what I was trying to do, really fast. >>>