The Incubator Center has been for many years a haven for entrepreneurial students and faculty. The center is a business innovation incubator with a mission to assist start-up and early stage technology firms grow and prosper. The Incubator Center aims to accelerate commercialization for early stage companies while seeking funding, intellectual capital, business development expertise, and potential strategic relationships with top companies. It has in turn produced over 2,000 jobs and increased economic development in Rensselaer County.
The Incubator Center has been following an upward trend in terms of successful technological start-ups developing, allowing it to be on the leading edge of technology firm development. “As a place devoted exclusively to giving life to new ideas, the incubator acts as a ‘living laboratory’ where ideas generated in classrooms, research centers, and beyond can be tested and applied in real-world environments,” said Michael J. Tentnowski, the recently appointed director of the Incubator Center. He was previously the Executive Director of the Physical Science Institute in New Mexico State University which, similar to the Rensselaer incubator, also commercializes intellectual property and provides entrepreneurial training.
Founded in 1980, the Incubator Program was the first wholly university-based business incubator in the nation, owned and operated by RPI, through the Office of Intellectual Property. The incubator is open to all start-ups in the exhibiting technology products or services.
Start-ups through university-based incubators have seen more development and opportunity due to the unique resources available, including student talent and faculty expertise. According to a National Business Incubator Association (NBIA) survey, “Academic institutions were the most common incubation program sponsor. … In 2001 alone, North American Incubators assisted more than 35,000 start-up companies that provided full-time employment for nearly 82,000 workers and generated annual earnings of more than $7 billion.” The Capital Region—the new “tech valley”—has also added to the wealth of resources for the incubator. The incubator recently initiated six new high tech enterprises involving the creation of tools to diagnose infrastructure, renewable energy, and a wide variety of other technologies. The Archimedes Group, Hestia BioEnergy, Landform Logic, Simplicita, VoiceFlight Systems, and Zomega are some of the technology enterprises.
Since its inception, the Incubator center has served over 1,080 companies, with more than an 80 percent survival rate. Currently the incubator employs over 250 students, faculty, staff, and community members accounting for 25 technology enterprises. Since 1980, the incubator has created over 2,000 jobs and has employed hundreds of RPI students. The annual sales of firms developed through the incubator have resulted in over $500 million in annual sales.
Students, faculty, and outside members share evenly—each about a third—of the incubator’s resources, while approximately two thirds of participating companies have evolved from research at Rensselaer or through the innovation of Rensselaer alumni. Acceptance into the incubator requires meeting certain criteria. A start-up company must exhibit a business concept involving technology-based products or services, demonstrate financial recourses to sustain the business during the startup phase, and display the capacity and motivation of an entrepreneurial team. Several exploratory meetings between the entrepreneur and the incubator staff result in a submission of a formal business plan evaluated by Tentnowski.
