Business Incubator Series: Fred Hoch And Terry Howerton, TechNexus, Chicago, Illinois (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Terry: How do we reproduce that collaborative environment online in a way that the companies that come through here – almost 1,000 companies came through in the past three months – how do they collaborate without having to come through the facility every day? How do we extend that in way that there’s still value added but through our online tools?

So, we’re about ready to roll out an entire set of online community features that replicate the real-world collaboration that’s happening here.

The third area that’s a bit of a bottleneck that we’re also addressing now concerns capital.

As I said, we’re much more interested in companies that can bootstrap themselves to success or that we can connect up with somebody in the industry whom we think might be a good partner or a good acquirer of this technology.

What we’re now working on is figuring out ways to formalize that and create more clear pathways between companies and capital sources as opposed to making it informal.

It’s not about raising $2 million rounds of funding, but occasionally, it is about having somebody who could put $100,000 or $500,000 into a company at the exact moment when [the company] needs that capital.

So, we’re eliminating that bottleneck now, too, by bringing some more formality to the process of fundraising for some of these companies.

Irina: You are a member of the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA). How do you participate?

Terry: We joined NBIA about a year ago and have participated with them on a national level in public policy discussions.

We’ve spent some time on Capitol Hill, talking together about public policy initiatives. We found some value in that. We also enjoy reading and participating in some in the discussion lists of incubator operators around the country.

Each incubator is a bit different. It seems to us that most incubators are a lot different from ours. So, it’s interesting to read the emails that go back and forth between incubators that are a lot different from ours, but that we can still pick up some value from or see that we’re walking similar paths.

Irina: Thank you for sharing your story.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Fred Hoch And Terry Howerton, TechNexus, Chicago, Illinois
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