Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: What are your metrics for success? What do you measure?

Tim: One of the things we measure is graduation. We try to track our companies, we can’t do it. It is very hard and very expensive. But we have had Northwestern faculty track companies in the incubator just after they leave, after five years, and after 15 years to try to identify what they call the incubator effect.

So, we have collected a lot of data. We have to, as I said, survey our companies, at least those that stay in Evanston, every year. We had 25 last year and 470 jobs created. We monitor job creation.

We monitor how much square footage they have under our lease because that is a rough way of measuring their impact on the occupancy rate in the buildings in downtown.

We monitor the financing, how much financing they attract to a given area.

Irina: On average, how long does a company stay in your incubator?

Tim: About three years.

Irina: How is your incubator funded?

Tim: We get private contributions because we are not-for-profit, and we run various service contracts. We have contracts for the City of Evanston and the State of Illinois. We had had contracts with the government of Japan to help train entrepreneurs from Japan.

We also have an outreach program, that we get funded for, to provide the same kind of counseling to lower-income people trying to start businesses.

Irina: What was the essence of the contract with the Japanese government?

Tim: We hosted Japanese entrepreneurs to come here for a year or two with sponsorship by the Japanese government to receive fairly intensive interaction with our TIC staff.

I went to Japan several times. The first time I went I was part of the recruitment process. Then, occasionally, they hooked me up to do some talks for other incubator programs that were getting started there.

Then, with the group called the National Business Incubator Association (NBIA) a few years ago, I think, for three years running, we did an incubator manager training program for Japanese people who were going to try to manage some of the incubators they were starting. They came over here for a three-day training program. We did that with Dinah Adkins. She was running at that time NBIA.

We would love to do it with other countries. I have been in conversation with a few. The model is transferable to other countries, but till now we haven’t been able to get anything establish.

I actually think it is a great idea. I think, it is very easy to put these people in a true entrepreneurial environment when they come from a background that is not as entrepreneurial as we are here, to teach them and to let them see a little bit about how it works, learn from other entrepreneurial firms, work again with people from Northwestern. I think it was great. The Japanese simply they don’t have the money right now. They have problems of their own.

Irina: Whose idea was that to do Japanese program?

Tim: I brought the idea to NBIA. We initiated it with an organization in Japan called JETRO – Japan External Trade Organization, it is called, and we did it through JETRO in Chicago.

They actually came up with the idea. They came and met with me. They got excited about it. They went to Tokyo, convinced the people there to do it, and we made it happen. We did it with them for 10 years.

So, we jointly with JETRO selected Japanese entrepreneurs who were interested in coming in United States for two purposes, one — to penetrate the U.S. market, either for their products or try to tap capital, and two — to learn about being entrepreneurs and, we hoped, take those skills back with them to Japan.

One component was working with the Japanese entrepreneurs and the second was our going to Japan and talking about entrepreneurship and meeting with city governments. I went to Hiroshima, Tokyo, Osaka, all over, and met with different agencies.

Then, the third component was these training programs. When governments or private entities decided to establish an incubator, they would sent the person they had as incubator manager here to Evanston for three days and I, along with Dinah Atkins and her people, would provide presentations, panels, tours of our incubator facilities, meeting with incubator companies, receptions for them downtown to meet some of  the banks, the investors and others from the Chicago area. We put together a three-day program and we ran that I believe for three years.

That was pretty expensive because each of those people had to fly here, and we had around 40 to 45 as I recall participants in each one of those. So, that they ended up stopping just because it was awfully expensive. That was a lot of people to fly from Japan.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center - Evanston, Illinois
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