Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: What other kind of projects students usually do?

Tim: We had a company that did consumer electronics. They had a little bug zapper that they were designing, and we had a student group that came in and helped with that. As matter of fact, they produced a patent out of some of the suggestions they made, and our company was willing to give that patent to the students.

So, the students do a lot design and prototype work and then, on the other side, a lot of it is marketing.

Let’s say I have a new material, I have a device that can characterize the strength of this material. The students would try to help figure out whom this is worth the most to. What industry sector do I need to go to? Where this is going to be the most valuable? These are the kinds of questions they ask.

Doing that kind of market research is probably the other broad category that we most commonly deal with.

Irina: In addition to student work, do you use any paid consultants?

Tim: Generally speaking, we don’t. But the companies do, and when we use those kinds of people, we usually ask them [to come first to our events], as a little marketing thing for them.

Every Thursday we have a social gathering after work. Usually what I would ask is on a Thursday, about 4 o’clock, before that gathering starts, that the company speak for an hour. A lot of our companies will come, and if they can get that to turn into money, that is fine. Otherwise, our companies have gotten a good presentation.

[For example], last Thursday, we had a Northwestern professor who had many years of experiences with Quaker Oats, a Chicago company, and he gave a speech on marketing strategy. I know that at least three companies followed up with him, and more power to him. I am glad for him and he gave us a free seminar. So, we both win.

Irina: Do you use any curriculum to teach your entrepreneurs?

Tim: I wouldn’t use the word “curriculum” for what we do, but we offer a menu, we offer a range of services and resources. But we don’t require anybody to do anything in particular; the only thing I ask is that if they don’t use anything [at all] they would just leave and make room for other people.

But I try to make sure that a real market exists here. If people don’t want to talk to me, they don’t have to. Maybe they do a lot work with a faculty member at the Northwestern. Maybe they collaborate with another company here or join together to develop some product. That would be fine with me.

But, if they don’t talk to anybody else here, they don’t deal with any of the university staff, they don’t seek any help from the legal and financial help that we can give them, eventually I would say, you know, this is not working out for you here. You might be as well be someplace else, and you can make room for another company that would come in here.

I feel that we need a true marketplace here. These entrepreneurs are making their own choices. They make mistakes and they learn from their mistakes, and then, probably, they make better use of what we got, but that learning is done by them.

I don’t sit on anybody’s board. They remain entrepreneurs. These businesses remain theirs. Often, some of these heavily managed incubators simply turn these people into employees.

We don’t set milestones. Though if the company is not making progress after a couple of years, we might ask them to leave and make room for somebody who would.

But that rarely happens. My view is you make these things available, and you let people decide what they like and what they don’t.

One of the things I think makes [this approach] very powerful is that because nobody is required to do anything, if you do want to provide services to our companies, I find we tend to get the very best out of some of our service providers because they know [this]. I make sure that if you work with the company [here] and they are not happy, they are going to talk to all the other companies and you are not going to be back here.

So, I think we can really put the pressure on them because I promise any service provider who comes in here that I am not going to require anybody to talk to you. If you don’t get anybody to talk to you, you are not going to come back and, I think, that is much better way to do it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center - Evanston, Illinois
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