Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Since I started working with entrepreneurs and small business owners in 2006, the idea of business incubation has seen ebb and flow popularity. When I first heard of it, the idea was to set up small spaces where start-ups could start and grow to a point they’d be ready to move out of the incubator to their own space. Some incubators have time limits. If you’re a new business, you may only have a year or two before you have to move out. Once, in those early days, I toured an incubator at a university that was essentially a room partitioned off into maybe a dozen cubicles. Although there was a certain electricity in the air, once seated in your cubicle, you were pretty much isolated from the others working to grow their businesses. 

The idea of the incubator was—and is—to make it easier and less expensive to launch and grow a business. A sliding rent scale over the first year or two, sometimes starting at no rent for a few months, ramping up to full rent after the first year or two, was supposed to be the incentive to inspire people to start businesses. There are a lot of expenses and other considerations to starting a business and reduced rent, while being a nice incentive, did not make people run out and start new businesses. 

For retail businesses, the incubator is only good if the location is good for the business. We were involved in a good partnership with the city of Independence to use the iMall at 325 N. Penn as a business incubator a few years ago. The city rehabilitated the building and we offered the sliding rent scale to new businesses. While I’m not sure we attracted many people to start businesses, the arrangement was very helpful for several tenants that had already just started their businesses. A couple of years ago, some of the tenants went together and purchased the building. Today, although no longer an incubator, all spaces are rented and there is likely more foot traffic into the iMall than just about any other building in downtown Independence. 

Our newest effort at business incubation will be in the expansion building at Fab Lab ICC. (We hope to be breaking ground on the new building shortly after Thanksgiving.) This time, we’ll be using a class, Entrepreneurial Mindset, to help aspiring business owners develop and validate their market solutions and use Fab Lab ICC for prototyping and promotional materials. Individual business coaching will continue to be offered and for those that need space, a sliding-scale access to an incubator we’ll call the Entrepreneurs Bullpen Growth Accelerator. The analogy comes from the fact that in baseball, pitchers prepare and warm up for the game in the bull pen. In our Bull Pen, entrepreneurs will prepare and warm up for their entry into the marketplace. 

The physical Bull Pen will feature an open collaboration design. We see big advantages in the various clients being able to network and collaborate with each other while working on their own businesses. Participation in the Growth Accelerator won’t be limited to those renting space in the Bull Pen. Other new and growing businesses can access the services even though they already have a location. 

Inspiring people to start new businesses comes down to inspiring a change in mindset and self-confidence. That’s what we’re doing with the Entrepreneurial Mindset class and the Fab Lab experience. The new Entrepreneurs Bullpen, coming in the summer of 2018, will extend that mindset change to a physical collaborative space for those that are ready to move their new business into this special location thus reclaiming their dining room tables, spare bedrooms and/or garages.