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How To
Start an incubator
Business incubators have proven to be an effective way for fostering sustainable business growth and stimulating entrepreneurship. But establishing a business incubator is a challenging task. This section helps readers decide whether or not an incubator is the most appropriate business development tool for their circumstances, and sets out the feasibility and planning issues that underpin the establishment of a new incubator.
Feasibility Study and Planning
A feasibility study is an important and necessary step, to design the business incubator and assess whether or not and how an incubator might be feasible. Upon developing an understanding of your target client’s needs, and concluding that starting an incubator is the right response to the market conditions in your environment, many decisions are still ahead of you.
You will need to decide on what type of business incaubtor, what services to offer, how to finance your start-up, how to set up your governance structure, what human resources to have in-house vs. contract out, etc. The articles in this section seek to help you navigate this decision-making process and provide you with ideas for how to best plan your incubator.
Incubators around the world have many different types of legal structures; they can be stand-alone or connected to another institution, structured as a 'non-government organization', a 'foundation' or a 'for-profit' enterprise, etc. This section seeks to provide an overview of the various legal structures as well as the common legal documents needed to run an incubator.