Business Networking

Business incubation provide SMEs and start-ups with the ideal location to develop and grow their businesses, offering everything from virtual support, rent-a-desk through to state of the art laboratories and everything in between. They provide direct access to hands on intensive business support, access to finance and experts and to other entrepreneurs and suppliers to really make businesses and entrepreneurs to grow.

Starting any business is fraught with uncertainty, financial burdens and resource issues, but more so with innovative and entrepreneurial businesses due to the complexity of the products and services being developed and the sheer length of time it takes to fully develop the product. Incubators are ideally placed to remove some of the hurdles and to negotiate a path to the all important finance and mentoring all entrepreneurs need.

Business incubation provides a nurturing, instructive and supportive environment for entrepreneurs during the critical stages of starting up a new business. The goal of incubators is to increase the chance that a start-up will succeed, and shorten the time and reduce the cost of establishing and growing its business. If successful, business incubators can help to nurture the companies that will form the true creators of a region’s or nation’s future wealth and employment.

Currently, there are approximately 300 incubators in the UK, supporting in excess of 20,000 dynamic, creative and innovative businesses. They support all sectors, including ICT, science, technology, creative industries, social enterprises and all manner of entrepreneur – there is no age limit, gender or physical discrimination – ultimately, if you have a world class idea or innovation, business incubation is there to support you. It is important to put incubators into perspective.

Rather than being the last hope for failing companies, incubators serve as a launching pad for young and small businesses. Start-ups, which are innately dynamic entities, need access to support, and incubators are a means of providing this. Whether located in urban or rural areas, most incubators are distinguished by the specialist services that they offer in addition to a physical home for a budding company.

Make incubation a core business proposition to trigger
Entrepreneurship.
 Develop feasible business models at the incubation stage which align incentive structures towards measurable performance outcomes and provide stake in the outcomes (through knowledge equity, etc.).
 Emphasize the financial and commercialization aspects of incubation (i.e. on the feasibility of taking an idea to market, understanding risk mitigation-measurement-strategy, cash flows, analysis of business failures, ethics etc and not only technical feasibility) where the financial community can play a significant role.
 Actively involve industry (other successful entrepreneurs, angels, VCs, banks, chambers of commerce, associations etc) as part of the social networks for mentoring, thereby supplementing the efforts of academics within the educational institutions.
 Develop formal and informal systems of active, regular mentoring
by successful entrepreneurs, platforms for networking and peer
recognition, and honour successful emerging entrepreneurs at
regular intervals.
 Widen incubation and mentoring beyond technology related ventures, alumni and centres of excellence in metropolitan centres.
 Widen the incubation horizon beyond the start-up stage to also
include scaling up.
 Hold national and state level incubation seminars and workshops.

how these incubators can help me in setting up my business in india? can anyone provide me any contacts of these people?