Silicon Valley Has Incubators For Entrepreneurs – Now UT Does Too

University of Tampa’s Spartan Incubator is gearing up to host the class of 2019.

The incubator, open to entrepreneurs with fledgling businesses in the Tampa Bay region, is taking applications now for a cohort of 16 companies that will spend the next several months learning from experts and from each other about how to grow their businesses.

Business incubators are viewed as economic development tools, and the Spartan Incubator, located in the John P. Lowth Entrepreneurship Center in the Sykes College of Business, is one of a growing number of local facilities where startups and early-stage firms can get business advice, fine tune their products and connect with potential partners and investors. Tampa Bay Wave in downtown Tampa and Tec Garage in St. Petersburg are among the larger incubators in the area.

“Our [incubator] is to feed the others,” said Kevin Moore, assistant professor of management at UT. “The others are great resources for when our folks leave here.”

The Spartan Incubator and a related facility, the Spartan Accelerator, opened three years ago. The accelerator is for student-led businesses, and houses 25 to 35 companies every semester, Moore said. The incubator is open to anyone in the region, and includes eight resident companies as well as eight others that are off-site and participate in incubator activities without having dedicated space in the facility.

Incubator graduates include NoMo Nausea, with products such as a wristband designed to relieve nausea; CaseGlide, with insurance technology software; and CareFull Catch, a disposable specimen cup holder. Those companies and other incubator alumni have drawn “a couple of million dollars” in investment and have combined revenue of $3 million to $4 million, Moore said.

Successful applicants for the incubator will meet three key criteria.

They are coachable. Entrepreneurs-in-residence and other experts work with the incubator companies and form mentoring relationships. Past guests who have spoken to the incubator companies include Bob Circosta, a HSNhost known as the “Billion Dollar Man;” Maryann Ferenc, co-proprietor of Mise en Place; tech entrepreneur and former Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg; and Kevin Harrington, one of the original “sharks” on the ABC TV show “Shark Tank.”
They are willing to work with students. “We want to be highly aligned with the mission of University of Tampa,” Moore said. “Everything we do is for the student experiences, so when these folks are on board, our students work on their projects. That has proven to be one of the biggest benefits.”
They are a good fit for the space. A biopharma company likely would not fit, because there’s no wet lab space, but a company selling into the pharmaceutical space would work and could take advantage of connections available, Moore said.