Written by Ric Camacho, Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice
Ric Camacho, Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice
How do large, established institutions foster innovation and significantly encourage the growth of the start-up community in their area?
Well one way is to take Cornell University’s high profile approach of pouring millions of dollars into a new technology campus in NYC. The other is NYU-Poly’s incubator approach. “It’s more art than science”, according to Steve Kuyan, executive director of the NYU-Poly Incubator Initiatives. Kuyan gave a brief talk on NYU-Poly’s initiative to kickstart innovation at the 2013 Information Industry Summit in New York last week. At the heart of New York’s burgeoning start-up environment, NYU-Ploy’s formula offers a combination of mentorship, educational resources, access to capital and industry leaders, community and physical “ecosystem” along with a healthy dose of “celebration and inspiration.”
The NYU-Poly Incubator Initiatives is one of the large number of university-based organizations around the country that seek to encourage and capitalize on the growth of technology. According to the National Business Incubation Association, fully one-third of the business incubators around the United States are associated with universities. The incubator initiative at NYU-Poly has been successful in helping over 20 companies in the past three years raise significant venture funding. According to to Kuyan, with as little as $3 million in investment, the incubators initiative has had over $200 million of economic impact and this is expected to grow to just under $1 billion by 2015. That’s no mean feat for a relatively new endeavor within a start-up environment — New York City — that, although going from strength to strength, has numerous initiatives clamoring for investment and capital.
NYU-Poly’s approach promotes the idea of “innovation anywhere” emphasizing the importance of the right physical environment and access to tools while also imposing some discipline around process and procedures and meeting metrics and milestone expectations–all in an effort to channel creativity and innovation.
In the end, Kuyan believes that their approach is key to lending validation and credibility to entrepreneurial start-ups. In the end, they are critical to accelerating and harnessing innovation. “All entrepreneurs today face similar problems”, according to Kuyan, and NYU-Poly’s success can be attributed in part to meeting their very basic needs.
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Ric Camacho
Ric has held senior product and management positions at a number of start-ups as well as at Reuters Media and Dow Jones. Most recently he was GM at Vitals, a NYC area-based Health 2.0 start-up, and headed up its B2B segment that delivered tools, technology and digital marketing services to the health provider market. Currently Ric is working on strategy and business development work for MyCollegePrice, an education innovator providing analysis and forecasting tools for the college advisory market.