Why incubator skills matter for nascent business

INCUBATORS, accelerators, innovation hubs, centres of excellence and entrepreneurship hubs are springing up across the globe, Tanzania inclusive, as new types of organisations that support and promote entrepreneurship.

Simply, this training course provides a set of tools to support business incubators in delivering their services according to international best practices, and in improving their management strategies.

Throughout the course, you will learn how to launch an incubation centre, how to define which services to offer on the basis of the needs of enterprises in your context, and how to support start-ups during the three phases of pre-incubation, incubation and post-incubation.

On this note, the Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship Development (IMED) conducted a fourday Business Incubator Management workshop in Dar es Salaam from 16 to 19 May 2023 to specifically provide skills on training, consultancy and research services in the area of entrepreneurship, management and private sector development in Tanzania.

Facilitating the training, IMED Director, Dr Donath Olomi elaborated the importance of business incubation as a package of services designed to support nascent businesses when they are most vulnerable.

He added: “It is increasingly being used as an effective strategy to support establishment and growth of innovative enterprises, addressing the critical shortage of jobs.

Effective incubator management is key for ensuring a successful incubator. The objective of the training workshop is to build capacity of incubator designers/ hosts, managers, staff, financiers, consultants and trainers in designing, managing and governing incubators successfully.” In quick analysis, he pointed out that the participants were trained to have greater ability to design business incubators, including doing a feasibility studies, preparing strategic and business plans and staffing incubators; market the incubator to both client businesses and stakeholders; finance the incubator from multiple sources; effectively manage the incubator processes and systems; and design and implement a mentorship system for incubates.

That was on the background of the four days workshop being delivered by experts from Tanzania, Sweden and Uganda, where participants from the government institutions, private companies and NGOs including the Institute of Finance Management (IFM), Agriculture Innovation Centre (AIC) under PASS Trust, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Rikolto, Tanzania Livestock Research Institute (TALIRI) and Soft Net attended.

As the workshop progressed, some experienced incubator practitioners from Tanzania Renewable Energy Business Incubator (TAREBI), Sahara Ventures, Uganda Renewable Energy Business Incubator (REBI) shared experiences and lessons with all so that they also become ambassadors to others.

Presiding over as the Guest of Honour, Funguo Innovation Programme Chief Executive Officer, Mr Joseph Manikazira praised the innovation and existence of IMED as an establishment that supports the innovation ecosystem in Tanzania. He added: “Since its establishment in 2009, IMED has been providing training, consulting and research services in the area of entrepreneurship, management and private sector development worth emulation in Tanzania and other countries.” Reached for a comment on the workshop, one of the participants Dr Fadhili Guni from Tanzania Livestock Research Institute learnt and advised nascent entrepreneurs to first conduct a feasibility study on their would-be business activities before embarking in implementation.

He added: “This will allow you to understand if the business is going to be viable or not, and from there you will be in a position to make decision accordingly.

In addition, you can be able to identify the available opportunity and challenges in place. “Again, you must have a strategic business model and clear objectives for sustainability of the business. Here, I learnt how to develop a business plan and important issues to be considered including a reliable market with a potential for rapid growth.”

For the public, especially the youth to venture into such businesses, he advised them to take the advantage of applying incubator management skills, since IMED has professionals, who are versed on imparting knowledge to deal with market forces, according to the needs and hence, serve the customers better than competitors.

He further said: “They will alert on value of the business and spell out the innovation that will create uniqueness of the service and/or products you provide; Cement the relationship with your potential customers by providing the mechanism to create a customer database that will aid in keeping friendly communication, and hence maintain them.”

Another participant, Henry Mchau from PASS TRUST said: “I learned about the best way to start an incubation centre, what things to consider when you want to start a centre. I also learned how to prepare a business plan for an incubation centre and how to manage that business plan to be implemented… the best way to find qualified young people because not all young people who come to join are interested in farming.

However, my advice to the community is that we should strive to find education in the management of incubator, we should not do it out of habit, doing it out of habit is what leads to the death of many incubation centres just because of the lack of proper knowledge of the operation of those centres.”

On his part, Silver Hokoro from Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), a public University based in Morogoro Tanzania considered the incubator course like any business, which should be managed in a professional way.

In his analysis, he said: “It’s important to institutionalise the incubator – with policies documents, full time manager, and board of directors for governance purpose.” This is because the sustainability of the incubator and the success rate should be clear from the onset, in order to help in managing incubator/incubatee expectations.

He added that in order to develop a business model should allow efficient use of available resources and innovation ecosystem so that resources used are not wasted, because this helps to focus on innovation that creates bigger impact to the society.