Artists as disrupters: an incubator where artists and technology meet

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A new New York Incubator takes a realistic look at the future of work in cities through the perspective of innovation in the arts
Forty full-time fee-paying members have been selected from over 400 applicants to have two years of full-time access to the 8,000 square foot co-working space in New York at the New Museum’s four-week-old art and technology co-working incubator. The space includes amenities typical of both business incubators and maker spaces, such as meeting spaces and technical equipment including 3D printers. Aside from access to the space, membership also includes business classes and mentorships.
The values people bring to the incubator are different than values at a conventional business incubator because “they are not necessarily devoted to profit, scale or attracting investors.”
Its goal is to support and diversify creative industries in New York City. A study by the New York Center for an Urban Future indicates that although New York turns out many art and design graduates who would like to stay in the city, unfortunately most don’t have resources to do so. Another study conducted by software company Intuit indicates that by 2020, more than 40 percent of the American workforce, or 60 million people, will be freelancers, contractors and temp workers. The hope is that it will become part of a vibrant New York City cultural and economic ecosystem as co-creators of a community that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Rafaël Rozendaal is an artist who creates unique URLs and websites in order to sell them to people who agree to be stewards, artist Lisa Park uses technology to detect her brain activity and then displays it in real-time as waves on pools of water and Carlo Van de Roer has created novel techniques for manipulating light in images and is working on patenting his inventions. NEW INC tries to help its members leverage the intellectual property they are creating without taking a financial interest.
‘When people describe themselves as an artist, they get less money for a job than when they describe themselves as technologists or engineers’, so there is a desire to confront semantic issues and traditional boundaries in art, technology, business and society.
The focus is on artists who are starting their own tech-oriented businesses or adding a “missing ingredient” to entrepreneur teams; and there is a desire to leverage this interdisciplinary community for social impact.
One commentator added that ‘…the creation of a business and the best businesses are motivated by the pursuit of an idea – the pursuit of a disruption, not by the money; usually the sustainability is due to the founder finding a way to turn a small failure into another disruption.’

See also other incubators in the arts:
The National Theatre’s Studio, a nursery for promising performances http://wp.me/p3beJt-f and
Watershed Bristol: innovation in media and the arts http://wp.me/p3eJt-3Y

John Whatmore
October, 2014

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Three different Nottingham Incubators to run snappy Bootcamps

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Three-day Bootcamps to kick off Accelerators – one in IT, another in Cleantech and the third in Life Sciences will aim to help participants to develop their ideas for a business into a fundable proposal that might enable them to take space in an Incubator for developing their business.

A natural sequence for a budding entrepreneur with the opportunity for a hi-growth new business might be to kick off in a 3-7 day Bootcamp, followed by participation in a 3-9 month Accelerator programme, leading on to a period in an Incubator – a pathway being explored in Nottingham.

The three different incubators in Nottingham plan each to run Bootcamps, starting this summer – with supporting funding for two years from Nottingham City Council.

Biocity, the city’s well-established incubator in Life Sciences and healthcare has run Bootcamps for entrepreneurs with new businesses for several years. The one-year-old CleanTech Centre incubator, which specialises in recycling and green technologies, is running its fourth in May. And Biocity, Cleantech and Antenna, Nottingham’s incubator for Digital and web-based businesses are aiming to come together to run an Accelerator Programme later in the year, with Bootcamps as a kick-off.

Each is likely to have a different emphasis from the others: while all will deal with finance, IP and marketing, each field operates under a different regulatory regime, with different technologies, different markets and different business models. While Accelerators have attracted IT startups because of their low start-up costs, easy proto-typing and testing on customers, startups in other fields, most notoriously in Life Sciences, have a much longer and more arduous life cycle.

These low-cost, three-day Bootcamps, also supported with finance by local services and by industry, and economically hosted in local incubators, are a crash course for people up to a year before or after they start new businesses. They aim to help to develop an idea into a full-blown and marketable business concept and one that might find an appropriate place in an incubator.

For up to fifteen people, they combine workshops, exercises, and interaction; starting with a pitch, they also culminate in a Dragon’s Den-type session. The participants meet mentors, advisers and experts who have ‘done it before’ or seen it before, and there is a lot of ‘pointing where to go for help’.

Once incubatees have a fundable proposition, at Biocity they can then pitch for a further period of structured support – on a one-to-one basis for a fixed period of  6-9 months (http://wp.me/p3beJt-i). Their mentor provides guidance and challenge, offering different perspectives, getting the participants to challenge the market, to look for revenue sources, to make a business plan, and to iterate that plan; teaching about investors and shareholdings, helping them to pull together a package for potential investors, and to handle possible due diligence; and then possibly taking a board seat.

 

Evaluating processes for developing young businesses is virtually impossible – because there are so many elements involved in success or failure; and because it cannot be done until several years later. So signs and signals from experiments like these are the stuff of evolution – to be watched with great interest.