Business Incubator Series: Bruce Wright And Molly Gilbert, Arizona Center for Innovation – Tucson (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is the application process to your incubator?

Molly: They have an application that they need to fill out. We sit down and we meet with them, probably a couple of times, and try and sort out what their technologies are, what they’re trying to build their companies around, so that we have a pretty good idea.

Then, we vet it out with our management team on whether these are companies that we can work with and that we think have ideas that can move forward.

Irina: How many applications come your way every month?

Molly: We probably get about four or five a month.

Irina: How many do you accept?

Bruce: We don’t put a limit on it. What we really try to do is decide whether the company has a real chance at commercialization. Is the technology commercializable?

Second, is the founder committed to moving the company forward? Do we have the expertise that allows us to help the company?

We go through a dialog, an interactive process, with the applicant to make sure that they are serious about taking the company forward and that we can help them.

We make a mutual decision about companies. We have a small committee that reviews all the applications. We interview the candidate companies, we make a decision, and then we invite them to come into the incubator.

Irina: Once a company is accepted for incubation, what is your next step?

Molly: The next step is to sit down and do a pretty thorough assessment. We meet with them and figure out where exactly they are in having formed their companies.

Did they put together their LLCs? Do they have the business plans? What are the most immediate needs? [And then we] start to put together a working plan of what needs to be addressed more quickly; what’s a little bit longer term; we start to work with them on putting those components together.

If they haven’t organized their companies formally into LLCs or S corps or C corps, we work with them on helping them put those structures in place. If they’ve done that and their next step is starting to look at putting together their marketing plan, then that’s what we’re going to focus on with them.

Irina: Do you have any special methodology? Who works with them?

Bruce: We have a combination of things. First of all, we have our director, Joann MacMaster, is an experienced entrepreneur and has been involved in business incubation for a number of years. Molly and I, we draw upon our advisory board, which is a group of local serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others with experience in startups. Sometimes we’ll draw on an industry to come in and help us make that assessment.

Irina: What are your metrics for success?

Bruce: At the startup phase, we have a different series of items that we want the company to complete, and we step them through each one of those, evaluating their concept, their technology, the requirements for moving the technology forward in our mentors lunch. Then we ask them to work through a whole series of steps to conceptualize their technology and put the focus of their business plan together. Hopefully, at the end of that process, we may have the outline of a business plan in place. Then we move them to the next phase, which is in residence, where we actually formally adopt a business plan and start to help them produce their products and secure investments. We have this entire series of outcomes that we require the companies to fulfill as they move through each phase of our process.

Irina: Do you have any particular success stories that you want to share?

Bruce: Sure. One of them is a company called Medipacs.  This was a local inventor who brought his technology to us. He was referred to us by the Small Business Development Center here in Tucson. We had worked with him and helped him put his company together and move his product to the point where they’re ready to take the product out into the marketplace.

What he invented is a product that is an infusion pump device for delivery medication intravenously to patients on a continuous basis. It uses optical materials as the mechanism by which the medication is administered to the patient.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Bruce Wright And Molly Gilbert, Arizona Center for Innovation – Tucson
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