Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ken: So, our client, Advanced Battery Concepts, created a revolutionary technology, lead acid batteries that have a longer life cycle, weigh half as much, and cost less to produce.

We have lead acid batteries all over the world. China would like to have lots of electric scooters. Much of our new alternative energy has problem in that it generates energy in real time, a wind mill or solar collection. This real-time collection might not correspond well with usage time. Batteries are fundamental to green energies.

We think there’s a huge opportunity there. We started working with them about four years ago. We have had lots of mentoring with the company. We helped them raise successive rounds of capital. We believe they are going to be a home run. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you use a lot of volunteer mentors?

Ken: Yes. Our mentor profiling is I’ll work for fame and feeling good or I’ll work for fortune.

If you want to work for fortune, then you want to eventually get paid, or you’ll take equity. We’re letting our mentors profile and say, “I’m looking for a small company. I really want to mentor and help. But I want a stake in it. I want some equity. I’m doing this as a semiretired professional, and I want to get paid for my services.”

Or, “I’m doing this because I believe it has social and community value.” They have options of defining how they’re willing to mentor. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ken: I wish you could interview all of our ribbon partners. We have work going on in Cadillac, Michigan, in Claire, Michigan, in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, in Marlette, Michigan. Some of these are pretty small towns. We’ve got groups supporting small businesses, bringing them what we believe are cutting-edge technologies and access to capital. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ken: To me, the concept of saying we’re an incubator is somewhat arrogant. I’ve run two venture-backed companies that have IPO’ed. I’ve run a public company for years, after our IPO. I’ve been through those, and I found that there were lots of people who showed up after each successive event saying they were there and made it happen. We don’t spend much time doing that. We try to be a professional service provider. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ken: Through our center, Chris Moultrup directs a program we call 1,000 Angels, which is a statewide initiative to expand angel investing in the state, whether it’s done by individuals on their own or working with universities in setting up alumni networks. We know that we need early-stage seed capital to grow these companies. So, the incubator has an intimate relationship with the angel club. >>>

Business Incubator Series: An Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, Startup Accelerator TechStars – Boulder, Colorado (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What about those entrepreneurs who are completely not ready for your accelerator?

David: Yes. My guess is that’s somewhere around two thirds. A third of them might get into a program like this somewhere around the world at some point, or they might go on to have some level of success.

What we do is when we say no, we always try to provide local resources. Depending on the city, we’ll say, “In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Innovation Center,” for example.

We try to create awareness for the companies that don’t get in about other local resources they can use. We’re trying to do things that provide as much help as we can.

Obviously, we’re not going to take 500 companies into our program. It’s not what we do as investors. We want to find ways like the book [that we wrote] or through blogging, or through other local resources, to help people who don’t get into our program. >>>

Business Incubator Series: Interview With Ken Kousky, CEO, MidMichigan Innovation Center, Midland, Michigan (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

I am talking to Ken Kousky, CEO of MidMichigan Innovation Center, which is a privately funded, nonprofit organization working to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses in central Michigan. MMIC operates a 112,000 square foot business incubator with significant support from The Dow Chemical Company. The center operates with minimal staff and uses resources from around the region to create collaborative partnerships for the benefit of its tenants, virtual members, and aspiring entrepreneurs. >>>

Business Incubator Series: An Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, Startup Accelerator TechStars – Boulder, Colorado (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any special initiatives at the moment?

David: We just launched the TechStars network, which is based on massive inbound demand for programs around the world that wanted to use this deep mentorship and community model.

We essentially just open-sourced TechStars, and we call it the TechStars Network. Over the past few years, I’ve been on probably about 100 phone calls with groups that were trying to do something like we had done, in their city. I’ve tried to be helpful. We’ve given them budgets. We’ve given them legal documents. We’ve given them our results. >>>