TBIXI3

Original BIC Office in Building 22
What are the origins of the term business
incubator?
When my grandfather and his sons took my father out of the
hardware store to start running the Batavia Industrial Center
they told my father: "Eh Joe, we have to fill the building,
create jobs and make money by doing it". That's still the job
53 years later. Since bills were high from the word go and
given that a lot of space was occupied by warehouses or
other activities that didn't create a lot of jobs, we soon came
to realize that we had to find job-creating businesses
replacing those less labour intensive ones. One of the first
businesses at that time was the Mount Hope Hatchery, a
chicken hatchery from Rochester, New York that used
80,000 square feet of space to hatch baby chicks. My father
was showing a reporter around the facility once day and
while explaining the business in a rather light-hearted
fashion remarked, "While they are busy incubating eggs, we
are busy incubating businesses". And the name stuck - and
today it is synonymous for business development enterprises
worldwide. By the late 1980s, almost all business
development organizations were identifying themselves as
business incubators.
What were the crucial turning points and the role
(if any) played by the public sector in this venture?
The public sector had little impact on the original business.
In 1984 however, they provided a low-interest loan that
covered forty percent of the project costs. Parties with vested
36 February - May 2013
While they are busy incubating
eggs, we are busy incubating
businesses
interests in the bail-out suggested we borrow money from
the Federal Government to create a local revolving fund
generated by the loan repayment. That fund only lends up to
about US$ 20,000, but in our experience small businesses
need mentoring more than money. There was a five-year lull
in public sector involvement and then we attempted to tear
down the original structure and build a more modern
complex to better address the needs of emerging businesses.
The State helped with some grants, but we borrowed the
rest.
How did the incubator - which began as a realestate
operation - deal with the high costs
structure that typically affect this kind of
business?
We worked very hard to fill the building as fast as we could
and we used that money to maintain the building, make its
operational management more efficient and self-sufficient
and finance development programmes for the small
businesses. The Batavia Industrial Center, the incubator that
most people know, has grown to 900 thousand square feet
with 30 acres of land. In my experience the cost of the
people, the management that provides the assistance to the
tenants, is as high as the cost of the building upkeep. It's one
of the reasons why we focus on larger buildings so that we
can spread the cost of the programme over enough space,
thus keeping rents low enough to help and attract the
businesses.