This field needs to first step out of the comfort zone, and incubators have become "second landlords"? Drive innovation networks | entrepreneurs | incubators
Incubators are located in the "first mile" of serving entrepreneurs, helping them turn their entrepreneurial ideas into products, businesses, and continuous businesses. For biological populations, hatching is a crucial link in reproduction and reproduction. Incubators in the entrepreneurial ecosystem are equally crucial, as they are an important link connecting research and development and industrialization, responsible for promoting the transformation of technological innovation and the continuation of economic momentum.
The domestic incubator industry has gone through 36 years and achieved fruitful results; Shanghai has over 500 incubators and collaborative spaces, with a huge scale. However, due to the increasing difficulty of entrepreneurship and the urgent task of technology transformation, the shortcomings and accumulated drawbacks of the incubator industry are also accelerating. Incubators must strive to improve their own level of competence, break through the bottleneck that has long constrained the improvement of incubation effectiveness, in order to shoulder the heavy responsibility entrusted by the times and make new contributions to building a modern industrial system.
Improving professional service capabilities, or in other words, enhancing incubation capabilities, is the most core issue.
For a long time, some practitioners simply understood incubators as places that provide office workstations. Incubation services include renting workstations, registering, and organizing events. But as more and more industry segments shift from "blue ocean" to "red ocean", these "shallow services" are becoming increasingly difficult to meet the needs of technology-based startups. At the same time, some managers of incubators lack a strong industrial background and resources, as well as entrepreneurial spirit. Many practitioners are accustomed to lying flat in the "comfort zone" and are satisfied with surviving by earning "second landlord" rent and government subsidies, rather than obtaining market returns through professional services, and are unwilling to invest real money in angel investments - all of which require a high level of skill and extremely difficult efforts.
According to statistics, about 25% of incubators in Shanghai are "comprehensive incubators" that lack industrial positioning. Looking across the country, first-class incubators often focus on a specific niche field, actively building a vertical upstream and downstream ecosystem, serving enterprises according to market rules, creating value and obtaining returns in their services. Excellent incubator managers can provide valuable experience, gather networks and resources, help entrepreneurs overcome barriers, avoid misunderstandings, and continue to grow. At the same time, they are often angel investors who, based on a deep understanding of the entrepreneurial team, have the willingness and ability to provide angel investment to achieve the improvement of the incubator's own business model.
In the current era of intensified global competition and urgent technological self-reliance, there is no room for hesitation or delay, and the incubator industry must accelerate its transformation. Three years ago, Beijing took the lead in launching reforms, changing the management and evaluation methods for incubators that have been in place for decades, and re screening and supporting benchmark incubators. Although the reform measures vary in different regions, a key point cannot be avoided, which is to adhere to an industrial perspective, adhere to a result oriented approach, evaluate the level of incubators based on incubation effectiveness, and use it as a baton for government subsidies to force industry reform.
According to Fan Weijun, the director of the Shanghai Torch Innovation Incubation Museum, in order to promote the transformation of the incubator industry, we need to leverage policy guidance and promote the implementation of two "shifts" in incubator support policies. Firstly, the government's evaluation criteria for incubators should shift from focusing on incubation area and process in the past to focusing on incubation effectiveness, with indicators including the number of graduating enterprises, high-tech enterprises, the number of intellectual property rights of incubating enterprises, and the amount of financing, so that incubators can focus on improving their incubation level. Secondly, the government's support for fund allocation should shift from the past egalitarian approach to focusing on incentivizing the strong, promoting the strong to become stronger and better, and forcing other incubators to improve their capabilities.
Not only that, we need to vigorously develop professional incubators and promote the optimization and upgrading of incubation models. The business model of incubators is changing. We need to actively promote Shanghai's incubators to focus on the vertical industry track, clarify their industry positioning, optimize incubation methods around hard technology, and use cutting-edge technology transformation as the layout. By building technology testing and pilot platforms, we can accelerate enterprise growth and continuously generate "graduation enterprises". We should strongly encourage incubators to add angel investment functions for stock holding incubation. After all, only incubators with value-added service capabilities and firm confidence in enterprise development are willing to invest in startups with real money and silver.
At the same time, it is necessary to cultivate and gather excellent incubator managers to provide strong support for the improvement and upgrading of incubators. Shanghai itself has a rich talent reserve, and the key lies in taking effective measures to attract talents from various fields such as scientists, corporate executives, VC venture capitalists, "overseas returnees", and multiple entrepreneurs to incubate this industry full of opportunities, nurturing hope, and rapid growth. Together with entrepreneurs, we can fulfill our dreams, play the unique role of incubators, and break down barriers in the innovation chain, industry chain, and capital chain.
