Monday, August 20, 2012

Incubation: A cutting-edge tool for self employment

Increasing number of entrepreneurs in a country outshines the nation in the global arena and growing importance and visible impact of entrepreneurship in employment-generation in developing economies gives birth to an idea of business incubation. An entrepreneur not only charts on his/her own course but also pursues growth while generating wealth, employment and social good.
Entrepreneurs hold potential to transform a city, region and a country as entrepreneurship increases opportunities for employment, introduces and disseminates new methods and technology and also drives overall economy.


What is Business Incubation?
Incubation is a novel concept primarily gestated to help budding entrepreneurs to launch and develop their business with an intellectual assistance of experienced players. Business incubation is a contributive environment created to foster the sustainable growth potential and development of an enterprise. An incubation center offers various forms of assistance to entrepreneurs, including technical knowledge, market studies, access to loans and training programmes. Some also provide office space, meeting rooms and printing, photocopying, fax and Internet infrastructure.
In brief, a business incubation centre is a supportive environment being provided to the budding entrepreneurs aimed to foster their entrepreneurial ideas before they step into venture capital. In this age of globalisation, incubation centres are highly required as they fulfill an entrepreneur's dream of building his/her own company. These centres provides a helping hand to entrepreneurs via assisting in early capital, infrastructure and expert counselling which turn ideas into tangible business models. Besides supporting an entrepreneur, an incubation centre also drives nation's economy by generating new job opportunities.


Objective of Incubation Centre:
An incubation centre is not only aimed to create self-employment but also to convert a person, having a innovative business idea but less resources, into an entrepreneur by way of providing all support services. These incubation centres are playing a vital role in emerging a country as an economic powerhouse as they create high value jobs through fostering newbie and high potential firms.


Globally, the incubation centres have been classified into Tecnology Incubators and Business Incubators. The array of business support resources and services, developed and engineered by incubator management extend support to the successful development of entrepreneurial companies.


Advantages of Incubation:
Incubators are a boon for entrepreneurs. These centres come in all forms, like innovation centres, technopoles and science parks. Although this practice is widely accepted in industrialised countries, but now-a-days such activities are gaining momentum in developing countries as well. Some major advantages are :


Promoting newbie ventures of young entrepreneurs
During initial gestation period, offering a broad range of entrepreneurship development initiatives such as training, nursery incubator space
Central common machining facilities
Systems and networking support
Catalogue library
Extending financial aid
The facilities such as workshops, computer networks with Internet facilities etc. have proven to be a blessing for upcoming enterprises. Some entrepreneurial incubation centers also provide the availability of online consultancy in the form of management professionals' team. After analysing various business propositions, this team helps to develop best-suited business plans thereby providing greater impetus to newbie entrepreneurs.


Why India needs to promote Incubation programmes?
Gone are the days when a decent well paying and 9-5 desk job was all that one aspired for. Economic growth, globalisation are some of the factors spurting the need of having more and more entrepreneurs in the country. Incubations promote entrepreneurship spirit which not only creates successful businesses but also increases employment rate of a country.
Knowledge acts as a catalyst for change and the initial step to promote incubation programmes is to disseminate information with regard to business brooding. Further, the private sector involvement in this regard is also important. It has been found that financial lenders are often disinclined to provide loans and support research and technology innovation and modernisation in such programmes. But the encouragement to applied research can lure banks. Moreover, the business environment should be encouraged in order to stimulate young budding graduates to start up their own business.


Incubation centers in India
National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC), a miniratna company facilitating the growth of small enterprises since 1955, has created a Rapid Incubation Programme. The programme offers integrated support through rapid incubation of unemployed people in its technical and incubation centres. NSIC's Rapid Incubation Programme prepares unemployed persons for entrepreneurship and capacity building. It provides all needful facilities for potential entrepreneurs to learn product manufacturing and all its processes.
Besides NSIC's Rapid Incubation Programme, there are various incubation centres in India, such as -
Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM-Ahmedabad
SIDBI Innovation & Incubation Centre (SIIC), IIT-Kharagpur
Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IIT- Bombay
National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), Wadhwani Foundation
Technology Business Incubator (TBI), BITS Pilani
National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai


Conclusion
Although, an incubator does not guarantee success, but it can act as a nursery which will supervise and mentor the early mistakes of a new startup so that an entrepreneur could not end up causing financial or motivational loss in business.


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