I tackled a similar question last year, but two articles I came across recently got me thinking.
Are incubators worth the trouble for startups?
But Vijayashanker took a pass. She’d noticed that many incubators focus heavily on technology development but didn’t teach the business skills she wanted to master. “I was talking to people who had graduated from these business incubators, and the vast majority were still asking business questions,” she recalls. “They were talking about ‘How do we market? How do we find customers?'” As she did her research, she found that entrepreneurs in a variety of fields who’d built a company outside of the incubator scene “had the most knowledge and experience,” she said.
The there’s Google Ventures, which takes a more collaborative incubation approach to jump-starting innovation:
Maris’s formula includes an unusual emphasis on data–and a team of researchers to quantify elements that lead to successful investments. Then there’s his Startup Lab. According to just about everyone in the startup scene, including rival VCs, Google Ventures is one of the most hands-on, full-service funders in the Valley. “They have recruiting partners, design partners, engineering partners, user research partners,” says Somrat Niyogi, who has raised money from Google Ventures for his social TV startup Miso. “That kind of structure, you just don’t get in the VC community. Period.”…