Chapter 22
Business Incubators
Essential Idea: Seed Money, Free Help, Mentorship, and In-Kind Services Can Take You over the Top
What's that you say? You have a few old cell phones lying around the house but don't know what to do with them? You and millions of others. If we lived in San Diego, we could drop them off at a green ecoATM kiosk to be recycled. And if the test of these clever kiosks goes as well as expected—one of the backers is the company that rolled out the uber-successful Redbox DVD rental boxes—we soon won't need to live in San Diego to use them.
The ecoATM is a business born in a nonprofit high-tech business incubator in Southern California called EvoNexus. Like almost all similar business incubators, the EvoNexus incubator offers its startups a wide range of services at low or no cost: office space, support services, business coaching, legal and accounting assistance, networking, and much more. The idea is to provide all of the vital services that a typical startup might need, for 24 months, thereby allowing the new company to concentrate more on successfully launching their product or service and less on the gritty, day-to-day minutiae of operations.
EvoNexus is a fairly new business incubator and, like almost all such endeavors, is a public-private partnership. In this case, it is sponsored by San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation and companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers. Its purpose is to foster entrepreneurship, high-tech business development, ...
