Measuring Your Business Incubator’s Impact
| October 12, 2007 |  View for printing |
Most small businesses don’t make it to their fifth anniversary. In fact, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, only 44 percent make it past four years.
Business incubators work to help businesses do better than that by offering specialized services and mentoring. Does it work? Historically, NBIA member incubators have reported that 87 percent of all graduate firms are still in business. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?
But here’s the hitch: the data on incubator graduates is more than ten years old. Funding sources, federal government officials, the media, and others want up-to-date proof of incubation’s impact. Today. In their communities and yours.
That’s why NBIA, in cooperation with Southern California Edison, created this toolkit. We are providing incubator managers with the rationale and the tools they need to get started down this critical road of tracking success. We hope that this toolkit is the first step in a major data collection effort that will ultimately allow the industry not just to break the silence, but to break it with a triumphant message of success.
Full Toolkit: http://www.nbia.org/impact/index.php 
No reader comments so far. Be the first to comment by clicking the button below.
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law. Full copyright retained by the original publication. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
