Even during the tough times of pandemic, when everything was uncertain, we all had to face the challenges, professionally and personally. That was when some entrepreneurs found their way and adapted to the situation with innovative solutions.
Similarly, with entrepreneurship allowing organizations like incubators – it becomes pertinent to adapt and give extended buttress to the founders, protecting them against the adverse and uncertain conditions with mostly keeping the investment routes open by opting for private ltd company registration.
These days, as entrepreneurs across the world are acclimatizing their businesses to the new reality, ecosystem such as startup enabler and incubators are dealing with a new obstacle too: how to offer a real value to their fraternity in an age of digitalization and technology where zoom calls and WFH (work from home) is the new standard.
– Development of incubators.
Incubators differ in sizes and forms – with primary components evolving over the years from just brick and mortar infrastructure to support service and lastly to the model, we encounter mostly nowadays – a motley of entrepreneurial education, infrastructure, investment and networking, mentorship, usually offered in inclusive pedagogy and culminating with graduating of the startup and obtaining opportunities to showcase to investors.
Before the pandemic, many incubators depended on their programs’ in-person components – mentor meetings, desks, and demo days. The new reality has accentuated the significance of incubators in building flexibility and adaptability to offer a safe and secure, restrained space that protects startups from the market uncertainties and forces.
1. Virtual changeover
As it has been evident from the current state of affairs, proceeding startup programs are expected to be virtual. Moving forward from the in-person programs makes it uncomplicated on the pockets, the ambience, and accelerating the reporting and selection, allowing the entrepreneurs to build their businesses from where they currently are persistently.
Nonetheless, it is often agreed that the most significant value for programs for a startup, is opportunities to interact and network with other people. Here, virtual interaction between people to people would instead feel drab. Nonetheless, it offers a platform where people can interact with each other with flexibility across the globe.
To enhance the experience of virtual meet-ups – startup programs can deploy participative video calls via frequent check-ins, special software, and using interest groups to associate founders to outside of the program pedagogy. Regional programs can adopt the hybrid model made up of physical and virtual incubation.
2. On-demand entrée
Around the world, customers have been habituated to favour one-click solutions to satisfy their needs. This would mean quick access to knowledge resources and mentorship for startup founders to enhance their morale and startup success.
To serve that purpose, incubators would adopt the approach from where they can deliver online, offer storage for their entrepreneurial education resource, watch over the teams’ progress, collaborate software, adopt dashboards, rationalize mentor and mentee matches, and giving all the needed support at one place.
Hiring a data-driven and software-enabled approach would also equip startup programs to make clever recruitment decisions, keeping an eye on success metrics, and providing personalized support accordingly.
3. Offering hyper-personalized support.
With better and fast accessibility of knowledge resources and tools over the internet, founders would look for continuous and personalized support from the incubation programs. Moving forward, one size fits for all approach might not be useful and applicable to the founders from all sectors and stages. For instance, a hardware company that requires at least a year for research and development is at the next level of growth and maturity than a scalable, sustainable fashion E-commerce brand.
There are some ways by which this could be done – day-to-day follow-up and review meetups with founders, personalized introductions – general needs and stage of a startup and watching over the progress.
4. Niche positioning
To distinguish their offerings and engage with more flourishing communities, incubators would eye the programs to create their niche themes or verticals. This would contain branding programs that begin with logo registration online and gradually act as a support system for niche category of startups: stage oriented (early, launch and growth) or sector-oriented (MedTech, fintech, EdTech so on and so forth) with the mentors and resources allocated to particular fields.
Being in a niche environment allows founders of the startup to obtain the industry-specific exposure and buttress required to scale their venture to the next level.
For example, a growth-stage fintech startup would benefit more from a ‘fintech incubation’ program, with resources and mentors to aid in product management, regulatory compliance, and research around the field of financial technology in contrast to a sector-agnostic incubation program with generic support.
5. Entering into the global network.
With a forward stride in virtual operations, one of the prime advantages is anticipating obscure geographical boundaries and entrée to the global expertise pool. Likewise, as incubators change into remote programs, they would widen the horizon to global mentor networks and startup’s international application to support, thereby providing one-click access to global customers and markets to startups from their location.
As startup has been flourishing in India exponentially, incubators can be the game-changer factor that could drive the entrepreneurship, novelty, and employment.