Incubation

When people hear me say the words incubation or incubator, the next phrase that normally follows is "What’s that?"

Then people begin to think that I’m either- somehow involved in delivering newborn babies or that I’m now in the poultry industry.

The first answer — that of delivering newborn babies — is probably closer to the truth.

However, in the case of the UP Ayala Technology Business Incubator, what we incubate are young technology companies that are just starting to grow their wings before soaring like eagles into the sky.

So what exactly is an incubator in the context of nurturing young companies?

Simply put, it is a place where they can concentrate on developing their technology products (or sometimes services), and pool together other concerns like accounting, legal, use of a common printer pool, and the like.

In other words, we give the technology entrepreneur time to concentrate on their technology innovation, and let the incubator worry first about mundane things like business permits, and the like.

It also has to be cheap. Most of the tech products of these tech start-ups came from old dissertations and thesis papers that were able to avail of some angel investment capital (e.g. less than half a million pesos).

In some cases, there was no capital upfront except that there was already a purchase order in which case the developers had to work for free until they were able to bill the client.

The incubator, therefore, has to have fairly lower rates than in places like Makati and Ortigas (although that can never be assured, of course).

It doesn’t have to be big either. Two- to three-man software start-ups, with their computers can sometimes operate in spaces as small as 20 to 30 square meters.

But what matters is a careful understanding of the anthropology of behaviors that support these start-ups.

For example, if the technology requires frequent access to the labs and faculty of certain universities or industries, then it would make sense to locate these incubators near those institutions or industries.

Case in point is the Ateneo de Manila start-up called Blue Chips, which is run by some ADMU professors to build software for some Japanese printer companies.

The reason it makes sense for the ADMU faculty to make their business and their teaching practice work, is that their office is literally a stone’s throw away from the ADMU campus.

Currently, and only because the UP Ayala TBI is limited in space to incubating a maximum of nine start-ups, it is still unable to satisfy the demand from around 50 tech start-ups that would like to be incubated, too.

What many people probably do not realize is that the Hewlett Packard/Apple model of incubating in a garage is more common here than what people think.

In the Diliman-Loyola Heights area alone, there are many tech start-ups — mostly software, a few hardware — that populate Xavierville, Teachers Village, UP Village, the condos along Katipunan, and various other places in these areas.

How do I know? Because every so often, we hold a Kapihan at UP Ayala TBI, and that is when these people come out of the woodwork and update me on what they are doing.

The only reason we don’t think there is a Silicon Valley model in the Philippines is because we have never seen it. But I assure you, it exists below the radar, quietly simmering and developing.

source: www.itmatters.com.ph