Is complete online incubation possible

ONLINE MENTORSHIP

A business incubator is a company that helps startups and new businesses accelerate their growth and success. Incubators do this by providing support in a variety of areas including management training, office space, capital, mentorship, and networking connections.

The main purpose of an incubator is to help startups at a very early stage to grow. They are collaborative programs which help people solve problems associated with launching a startup by providing a space to work, seed funding, mentoring, training, and other benefits.

Many business incubators support small businesses or startups. So, if you’re looking for a “small business incubator,” you’re likely simply looking for a “business incubator” that provides support for business infrastructure, training, and capital.

Note that business incubators are different than business accelerators. While incubators exist to nurture the growth of a new business, accelerators are generally geared towards helping entrepreneurs transform their ideas into products or services that are ready for market quickly — in as little as a few months.

It’s important to know the difference between these two models and to discern which is right for your company or idea.

What Does a Business Incubator Do?

An incubator should provide diverse benefits to startup entrepreneurs. These benefits can include:

1. Office space — Some incubators offer office space for free or below-market rates to their portfolio companies. This solves several problems for startups. Mainly, it allows them to find a professional space for their employees to work without having to sign a lease — especially helpful when the company is unsure how quickly they’ll scale production or headcount.
2. Specialized equipment — Some incubators invest in specialized equipment, like modeling software, 3D printers, prototyping equipment, or software development labs. This is a huge advantage for scaling companies in their infancy. Access to costly equipment and simulation programs can be crucial.
3. Experienced mentors — It’s important for startups to limit critical mistakes while scaling. Most incubators offer an experienced staff of savvy industry executives to help the core team stay focused and avoid mistakes. Incubators usually employ mentors with specific startup experience that can help explain process, planning, and decision criteria — all while steering new entrepreneurs away from costly mistakes they made or witnessed.
4. Group training and education — Many business incubators offer an array of important business training spanning from legal advice on startup documents, incorporation terms, or IP issues to general business challenges like how to ship a product, establish a quality culture, or establish sales and marketing processes.
5. Software discounts — From accounting to project management, incubators typically offer business software that helps their startups scale. Pricing and education are typically vetted and negotiated for a standard rate allowing portfolio companies to get right to work. HubSpot offers this type of arrangement to more than 1000 startup partners worldwide.
6. Shared business services — Much like leveraging software availability and selection, many incubators offer accounting, banking, marketing, and manufacturing services to help companies scale.
7. Community — One of the best attributes of business incubators are intangibles. Working with a group of like-minded entrepreneurs, using connections for connecting with prospects or customers, and learning from others in your cohort are invaluable parts of incubator life.

Well providing all of this online is very farfetched but providing an online mentoring platform for the incubators is a good place to start. Providing mentorship online to startups who are situated with incubators will help the incubators off some of the load and also it will allow them to service more startups eventually.

But, still, we can only predict the future.