An Interview With David Monkman, President And CEO, National Business Incubation Association (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is NBIA? Give us a brief overview.

David: NBIA is a trade association that services and works with business incubation programs around the world. We are a 25-year-old organization that has about 2,000 individual members, representing about 1,000 organizations in 65 countries.

We have two-thirds to three-quarters of our members based here in the United States, but our most rapidly growing segment is international members. Most of our members are in English-speaking countries, but we also have members in Latin America, francophone Africa, and different parts of Asia as well.

The industry developed 50 years ago in upstate New York. So, one of the reasons why we have such an international presence is because we’ve had the first mover advantage of supporting the industry early on.

We have developed extensive support information that’s helpful for incubator managers to set up new programs and to operate those programs. We’ve published 71 books over the years. Twenty-one of them are still in print.

We’ve sold 35,000 books to professionals over the past 25 years. We provide training, too, and have trained 15,000 people over the past 25 years. We’ve held conferences in different parts of the country and abroad. We’ve held 50 such events, including training events in different places, mostly in the United States.

I increasingly find there’s a lot interest from foreign governments and bilateral and multilateral donor groups to help assess the feasibility of new incubation networks and programs in national markets that are new to them.

So, we’ve been asked to advise the Japanese government, the Bulgarian government, the Malaysian government. We’re talking to stakeholders in Russia now and Mexico. We’re also being asked to consult in Poland, to serve entrepreneurs and ecosystems there more effectively. So, this is increasingly an important international initiative that features highly in the eyes of economic development officers around the world.

Irina: What resources do you offer online?

David: Our NBIA.org website has more than 10,000 pages of content, useful documents, and experiences that other incubator managers have found timeless and interesting.

A lot of the value that members get from belonging to NBIA comes from the website alone, as they might come from training or come from conferences or come from out books and publications. So, certainly, our website features highly among the information support services we provide for members.

Irina: Of NBIA’s 2,000 members, how many are incubators?

David: About 700.

Irina: You also have partner organizations. How do you work with them?

David: There are two kinds of partner organizations. One set are advocacy partners. There’s an innovation federation.

It’s a federation of nine trade associations like NBIA, that includes the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF). You mentioned its CEO, Jim Jaffe, earlier. He’s one of our federation members.

There’s also the Association of University Technology Managers and the Association of University Research Parks. Those trade associations are also represented.

Those are important partners for us in talking to stakeholders at the federal level about improving support for our members, partners whom we work closely with are vendors who provide services to incubators and incubator managers as well as to clients, people who reside at the incubators.

For example, in the United States, there are about 1,100 incubation programs that we’re aware of. On the other side of those, according to a study that we did a few years ago, there are about 27,000 clients who benefit from that existing incubation set.

The vendors and the partners whom we work closely with look to either improve the services and support levels that are provided by the incubator managers or target the clients that reside or are affiliated with the incubators.

So, our partners are an important member service, and it’s something that we’re always interested in maximizing. We want to make sure that we’re giving the greatest value proposition to members and their clients as possible.

Irina: What do you think is necessary to build a sustainable and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem?

David: A lot of it has to do with making sure that you have an alignment of expectation among the diverse stakeholders who participate in the ecosystem. This is true whether you’re looking at the incubators as facilitators of that ecosystem or you’re considering the diverse stakeholders who can support entrepreneurs in a local community, like banks, the investment community, the local small-business development centers, the SBA offices, or the economic development agencies or universities.

This segment is part 2 in the series : An Interview With David Monkman, President And CEO, National Business Incubation Association
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