Opportunity for entrepeneurs in “green house incubator”
Those looking to start their own business in Limerick are being offered the opportunity of a leg-up through a venture called “Green House,”
This is a start up incubator, a facility where a business can benefit from investment, expert advice and facilities during it’s early stages of growth.
Basically, it is a private sector solution to the horrendous amount of formalities involved in seeking help from government agencies when starting a business, as Evert Bopp, the brains behind the venture puts it:
A lot of the existing enterprise incubators were either state run or owned by Institutes of Technology. These academic or bureaucratic environments are by their nature not conducive for creativity, entrepreneurship and decisiveness. A lot of the start-ups time and energy is taken up with “non-essential” tasks not directly related to developing their business or product. Application processes take forever to complete, every step forward is hampered by red tape and bureaucracy and form goes before function.
So how does all this work then?
Limerick start-ups now have to go through an application process during which they are judged on their business idea & management team in order to determine their chances of success. If the board of management decides that the start-up has a more than average chance of success they will be offered a place in a 6-month incubation cycle. During this incubation cycle the start-up will not only receive office space and facilities, they will also be able to avail of a wide range of in-house professional services (legal, accounting, mentoring etc.) The people behind the GreenHouse will also open up their wide network of contacts to the start-ups and it will also become actively involved in developing the start-up. This all with the aim that the starting entrepreneur(s) can concentrate on developing their business, product or service.
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The Greenhouse incubator in Limerick will offer top of the range office facilities (fully furnished offices), excellent IT services & support, meeting room(s), canteen facilities (real coffee!), web hosting & development services, 24-hour access, postage & courier pick-up and delivery, central reception services and more.
To develop creativity and to encourage networking we will have weekly informal meetings where all start-ups discuss their business, their experiences and other issues. These meetings will borrow their format from the many Open Coffee Club meetings that have proven to be so successful all over the globe. The GreenHouse will also have a hot-desking facility where desks and meeting room facilities can be rented by the day. Research has shown that there is a market for this type of facility & service. By taking an equity stake in the start-ups we are taking a similar approach to the one taken by venture capitalists & angel investors. However our approach means that we will have a much more hands-on involvement in the development of the start-up. This will improve the level of success while also allowing us to keep a tighter control on the management & development of the start-up. The equity stakes will be combined with buy-back options or exit strategies. Our incubator concept is also not completely new; Y-combinator in Mountain View California & BetaWorks in New York are just two of the companies that have been very successful with this hands-on approach.
Have to admit, I don’t have a head for business, however, anything that will help get us all out of this recessionary hole we now find ourselves in can only be a good thing and worthy of promotion.
Anyway, if you wish to contact Mr. Bopp, you can do so through the Green House Website.