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Some time ago, I ended up attending a conference on entrepreneurship at one of our very prestigious B-schools. I was not speaking as part of any panel at the event, but rather an attendee like other students and entrepreneurs. I, however, wish that I was speaking there. There was some real bull flying across the hall that someone needed to splat on the wall.

The B-school had recently started its own incubator; an ‘e-cell’ which it claimed showed its commitment to launch a surge of entrepreneurship both inside and then outside the school. The dean firmly believed that entrepreneurship could be taught and that his school was always one in support of it from the beginning.

I had some views that I wanted to air right there and then, but I stayed true to my role of always being the silent one during conferences and forums. I also wanted to give the dean, whose baby was that incubator, the benefit of doubt. Maybe he had something up his sleeve that was yet to be shown.

I did float around the incubation center and meet up with some of the kids who had, while doing the course, decided to start up. The process was simple. They applied to the center with their business ideas and plans somewhere mid-term; the center picked the ones most viable, and then put them on a two-year clock. During these two years, they would get paid as well as get to use the center’s facilities for free. After that, they were on their own.

Fair enough. But two things struck me. For one, some of the startups had business ideas that were clearly unviable and un-scalable. I dare say, some of them were laughable, with all respect to the entrepreneurs. A few peers and I wondered, what were the academics at the center thinking, encouraging these startups?
Secondly, the guidance provided was a lot of theory, little practical testing, and almost no market research. This, I agree, could perhaps be the case only with this center. The most that the startups ended up doing, besides developing the product, was talking to the VCs who attended conferences, professors, peers, and people like me who were around.

What is an incubator’s role? What are its responsibilities? What should an incubatee get back from the incubator? I fear none of these roles were fixed at that time. I went back to the center recently. The two years had just ended. Of the six to eight startups I had met out of the 10-odd there, three folded with the entrepreneurs going back to sit on placements (that is always an option in incubators; I wish it wasn’t). The rest are still running, but at least two look nothing like the original businesses they had started out as; they are clones now. Sans one, the rest do not seem to have moved along. Perhaps it’s time to review the role incubators are playing. Perhaps in the next article.

AUGUST SHARK is a once-failed, second-time successful bootstrapper who resides in Mumbai. He can be contacted at august@stumpspeak.com.

©Entrepreneur February 2011

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August Shark, b-school, e-cell, incubator