What is Business Incubation?

Business Incubation has been misused as a term, and treated as a catch-all for many things that are not incubation at all.  Business incubation is, properly speaking, the process by which start-up businesses, whose life outside the incubator would be more fragile and susceptible to failure, are given the resource and protection required to ensure healthy and self-sustaining long-term life beyond the incubator.  All true business incubation requires the businesses incubated to mature and leave the incubator, or to fail and leave the incubator.  All true incubators also earn from the companies incubated (tenant companies) and therefore benefit from the success of their own incubation efforts.

Incubation has been treated variously as a glorified serviced office facility; as a means of providing business services at a charge; as an economic development tool for subsidised job creation; or as a means of grouping business clusters together, also at a charge, for real or imagined synergies.

Each, it will be noted, implies there is a specific value in proximity, and therefore places great emphasis on the benefits provided by a common building, or shared accommodation of some sort.

Yet the true concept of “incubation” does not have any bearing on business location, rather it has a bearing on life-stage, and health of a business.  If an incubator is to treat more than one business, the only reason for the two to be in the same place is for the convenience of those supplying the incubation services.

This may be a false economy.  In addition, the concept for incubation that will be pursued by Green Shoots is the idea that incubation of successful business start-ups requires input from business people who have experience of successful businesses.