By ANN RICHARDS
Business incubators are operating at 35 community colleges across the country – and 10 of those institutions* are using funding from the Mott Foundation to extend the range of services they provide to local entrepreneurs through technology.
“The idea behind this project is to figure out how we can give an entrepreneur 100 miles away from the college an equivalent experience to one who is located right here on
Community college business incubators are strengthening local economies across the U.S. |
our campus,” said Jim Shanahan, director of the Entrepreneurship Innovation Institute at Lorain County (Ohio) Community College (LCCC). It is one of the 10 community colleges taking part in the Virtual Incubation Network initiative, a project of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).
The multiyear demonstration, with $995,500 in funding from Mott, will help community colleges – particularly those in geographically isolated, depressed and hard-to-serve areas – better understand the potential of new communication technologies in spawning and fostering small business development in response to local market need and niche.
“Our goal is not to recreate but to maximize what’s already out there,” said James McKenney, vice president of workforce, economic development and international programs at AACC.
“We’ve purposely selected community colleges in areas where there is need for this type of service and that already are moving in this direction.”
A promising midwest model
For LCCC, the push to develop entrepreneurial services and coursework was a choice based on necessity: Heading into the 1980s, the Lorain/Elyria metro area, just west of Cleveland, found itself without a major employer.
“Without large companies or manufacturing plants, we had to ask ourselves how can a community best replenish its capacity to support the workforce it already has?” Shanahan said. “How does it position itself for growth? For us, the best approach to sustaining the local economy was to help our entrepreneurs commercialize good ideas.”
The college has come a long way since the mid-’80s. It now leads a nine-member consortium of higher education and economic development partners in northeast Ohio, serving entrepreneurs in 21 counties in collaboration with the federal Small Business Administration, local and state governments, and chambers of commerce. LCCC engages with local entrepreneurs through a “bricks and mortar” incubator, technology park and pre-seed-capital fund, as well as education and training services ranging from a two-day business “boot camp” to Ohio’s first associate degree in applied business-entrepreneurship.
The Entrepreneur Innovation Center at LCCC has a focus on building high-tech businesses. |
LCCC’s Innovation Fund, which has awarded $4.3 million to 60 companies since it was launched in 2007, was recently recognized as a national model by the White House’s Startup America Initiative. That public/private effort pulls together some of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, educational institutions and foundations to work with federal agencies to increase the number and success of America’s entrepreneurs.
LCCC will help community colleges nationwide replicate the fund as part of the Virtual Incubation Network. Not only does the model – dubbed Innovation Fund America – help current entrepreneurs, but it also inspires the next generation of students to become innovators by requiring companies that receive awards to provide internships in entrepreneurship for students.
Marcia Ballinger, LCCC’s vice president of strategic and institutional development, will lead the college’s role in this initiative.
“What’s exciting about this new demonstration is that it gives us the opportunity to see how we can better connect all the pieces developed to support the college’s education mission and our economic development mission,” she said.
“The virtual piece – using new technology tools to deliver services and share with other colleges – makes this project even more interesting.”
Expanding best practices through technology
Technology is fueling new ways of creating learning communities and networks, says AACC’s McKenney.
“These new tools are revolutionizing how ideas are shared,” he said. “With that in mind, our goal is to isolate what services entrepreneurs need to succeed and deliver them with more focus and less infrastructure.”
In addition to the 10-college network, AACC is working with its affiliate, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), which will provide technical assistance to each of the participating campuses and serve as a repository for best practices.
NACCE, founded in 2002, helps its 924-member colleges and institutions link their traditional role of workforce development with entrepreneurial development, according to Executive Director Heather Van Sickle.
The organization, headquartered at Massachusetts’ Springfield Technical Community College, grew out of an entrepreneurial institute that was experimenting with “the sweet spot” where classroom learning and experience merged to produce entrepreneurial know-how.
LCCC’s distance learning technology is expanding services for entrepreneurs. |
“Initially, we concentrated on developing an entrepreneurial model that we hoped to sell to interested colleges,” Van Sickle said. “But very quickly, we discovered the culture of community colleges is to share, not buy, from one another.”
And community colleges have a lot to share, she says. They have been offering courses in entrepreneurship since the early 1970s, when the field first emerged.
By 2007, at least 66 percent of the nation’s 1,167 community colleges offered at least one course in the subject; 14 percent offered an associate degree; 19 percent offered certification and 20 percent hosted a small business development center on campus, according to a survey by the University of Illinois-Urbana.
Because community colleges respond to local needs, their mix of entrepreneurial classes and services varies, Van Sickle says.
“Our task is to tease out the best practices and commonalities among the programs at the 10 colleges – isolate what it takes to commercialize an idea and then, to sustain a business,” she said. “Phase two will be building that reality into a curriculum and figuring out where technology – the virtual piece – can connect more entrepreneurs over a wider area with the mentorship and support they need.”
Said LCCC’s Shanahan: “We serve entrepreneurs throughout northeast Ohio and don’t always have the time or resources to meet them face-to-face. We know that to succeed, our clients need a high level of engagement, especially in the early phases of the commercialization process.
“To keep these relationships meaningful, we need to understand when and how virtual communication tools can be used to conserve time and span distance.”
Despite some significant successes, community colleges are still trying to learn how entrepreneurial skills can best be transferred to students and commercial clients.
“We know that incubating a good idea into a business takes a combination of structured coursework, layered with work-based learning, technical advice, seed and venture capital and the guidance of an experienced mentor,” LCCC’s Ballinger said.
“We need to gain a better understanding of how we can deliver all this stuff to entrepreneurs working at every level.”
And community colleges are ideally positioned to demonstrate how this can be done, says AACC’s McKenney.
“Not only do they serve isolated regions and small communities, but as key providers of career and technical training, community colleges also partner with the nation’s one-stop career centers through the public workforce system and Small Business Development Centers,” he said.
“The Virtual Incubation Network demonstration will give us an opportunity to better align this and other partnerships - and maximize what’s out there to assist entrepreneurs who create the jobs that can reconstitute local economies.”
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* Rio Salado College, Phoenix, AZ; Long Beach Community College, Long Beach, CA; North Iowa Area Community College, Mason City, IA; Mott Community College, Flint, MI; Southeast Community College, Lincoln, NE; White Mountain Community College, Berlin, NH; Burlington County Community College, Burlington, NJ; Santa Fe Community College, Santa Fe, NM; Lorain County Community College, Elyria, OH; and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Green Bay, WI