Tech companies need capital to fuel growth and innovation. Innovation Depot also hosts regular, weekly "Depot Connect" mixers just for member startup companies as a way to foster culture and collaboration among the entrepreneurs.Īnd let's not forget about funding. There are the traditional mixers and happy hours, but also "hackathons" and twice-monthly seminars on strategic topics in startup development and management. To foster this sense of community and enhance the incubator experience, Innovation Depot hosts regular community-wide events. There are also on-site business coaches to help with strategy and planning. This is one of the biggest advantages of working within an incubator, instant access to like-minded entrepreneurs offering helpful services. Not only are all of these companies physically close, but they are co-members of the tight-knit Innovation Depot community. The same is true for other business-critical services like accounting, public relations, intellectual property protection, payroll management, distribution logistics and custom software development. Lucky for you, there are a half-dozen strategic marketing and branding firms right inside Innovation Depot. Let's say you have a great product idea, but you need help developing a marketing plan. Once inside the incubator, Innovation Depot offers a suite of customized services for growing companies, many of them provided by other companies in the incubator. Members pay rent for their office space, which provides most of Innovation Depot's revenue. In addition to offering the conventional office amenities like conference rooms, WiFi, copiers, kitchens and (of course) ping-pong tables, Innovation Depot devotes a portion of its second-floor real estate to cutting-edge "wet labs," where biotech companies can research and develop new products and services. In 2014, the building held nearly 700 employees. So how does a business join an incubator and what services do they offer?Īdmitted companies move into offices inside Innovation Depot, which are leased by the month. In 2015, more than 7,000 business incubators operate worldwide, some in shiny Silicon Valley industrial parks, some on college campuses, and others in developing countries. The idea of an incubator sounds like something forged in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, but the business incubator concept dates all the way back to 1959, when the Batavia Industrial Center was created in upstate New York. Just 4 percent are sponsored by for-profit entities. Thirty-two percent of American incubators are sponsored by colleges and universities and 25 percent by economic development organizations. Innovation Depot, for example, is a nonprofit organization created by a partnership between the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the greater Birmingham business community to promote the local tech economy. Tech incubators come in all shapes and sizes and business models. There are more than 1,250 business incubators in the United States (up from 12 in 1980), and about 37 percent focus specifically on developing technology companies.
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