Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Jerry: When we hire students at the incubator, the university pays the students weekly, and then I bill the company and they reimburse the university for the students’ services.

Irina: How are the faculty compensated?

Jerry: It’s up to them. It could be free. It could be whatever it is. A lot of them, because they’re looking for student programs, could [do it as] a pro bono kind of thing. They could work together that way. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Tim: We had other ways of doing our Japanese program. We could have gone there. There are other ways of doing that, but that is the way they wanted to do it. They really wanted to see the environment here, which was great, but it wound up being costly. As I said, they did it for three years. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies have been incubated since 1988?

Jerry: I wouldn’t know. I presently have 95 companies in my center. We are the largest technology center in the country, to the best of my knowledge. >>>

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. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Jerry Creighton, Enterprise Development Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology – Newark (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

I am talking to Jerry Creighton, executive director of the Enterprise Development Center at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).  Based in Newark, New Jersey, the center is home to nearly 86 high-tech and life sciences companies. The center’s entrepreneurs have access to the institute’s facilities and can partner with researchers to help grow their business. EDC is also in the heart of Newark’s University Heights Science Park and the Newark Innovation Zone. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: Would you give us an example of service providers that come to your incubator?

Tim: We have people who made a living for a couple of years doing programming for various of our companies. You come in, you are doing C++ or something like that, you work with one of our companies and they say, Look this guy picked up what I was trying to do, really fast. >>>

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. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Stephen Fleming, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech – Atlanta (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What about those entrepreneurs who don’t need or want to raise money?

Stephen: Right, the bootstrappers. We have an active community of bootstrapping companies now, that for whatever reason, don’t need to or choose not to raise money – or choose not to raise money right now. We help them. The core proposition is to build something that somebody wants to pay for, build it fast, and bring in revenue. >>>