Business Incubator Series: Interview With Julia Rosen, Associate Vice-President For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, Venture Catalyst At ASU — Scottsdale, Arizona (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you engage with companies after they’ve completed the incubation program?

Julia: Not as well as we should. This is a struggle that I think most accelerators have. Once you don’t see them quite as frequently, it’s harder to keep track.

Irina: What is the business model of your incubator, and how do you support it?

Julia: It’s what I refer to as a patchwork of funding. Of course, we do receive some funding from the university. We also make our own money, earned income. We charge entrepreneurs for certain services. We charge them for space. We are able to earn money based on some of our offerings.

We also spend quite a bit of time applying for grants from the state and federal governments, and the private sector. We spend a considerable amount of time fundraising with individual donors and with private foundations.

Perhaps, most notably, even though we opened in July, we had our big formal opening in October. We opened with the announcement of a $1 million grant, which was stimulus money that was given to us by the State of Arizona governor’s office.

Irina: Would you talk a bit about the grants you give to entrepreneurs?

Julia: [That’s] our student entrepreneur program, which is called the Edson Student Entrepreneur Program. We are very lucky. We have a $5 million endowment at the ASU Foundation that was created by a man named Oren Edson. He founded Bayliner, which was a very, very successful company, while he was a student in college. That endowment [gives] out $200,000 per year in income.

Every year, we run a university-wide competition to award money to new for-profit and not-for-profit companies founded by ASU students. That amount of recurring income, we believe, is one of the largest of any U.S. university.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Interview With Julia Rosen, Associate Vice-President For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, Venture Catalyst At ASU — Scottsdale, Arizona
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