Incubator

Many development initiatives become more self-sustainable by defining what the appropriate role for their project is –that is, what role would best enable them to meet their objectives while leveraging resources, time and effort. One of their options is becoming an incubator. 

The role that an initiative adopts to address its target problem has very important effects on the way projects are designed, resources managed and allocated, and self-sustainability fostered. For this reason, several initiatives carefully consider and decide what they want to do with the problem they are tackling. Some projects choose to lay the groundwork for eradicating the problem in the future; others prefer to grow and become major service providers; and still others aim to devise and experiment with solutions that others can replicate elsewhere.

Initiatives that choose to act as incubators have decided that the best way to leverage their efforts and resources is to promote and support projects with social objectives that are similar or complementary to their own –be they educational, health, environmental, etc. Incubators either choose proposals with good potential or favor the development of new proposals, and then provide resources to solidify them and maximize their impact, such as consulting, infrastructure, opportunities to meet clients or collaborators, events and workshops, financing, or other support. In other words, incubators are in charge of finding out what each project needs to exist, subsist or grow, and then helping with all or some of these aspects of the project’s development.

When planning their self-sustainability, some initiatives come to the conclusion that it is in their best interest to become incubators because they can make better use of their resources when they invest in other actors to create or develop solutions. Through these collaborations, an incubator’s impact will be relevant to many more people, because several projects –rather than just the one– can reach more communities and solve target problems more comprehensively. In addition, when incubators decide to collaborate with local projects, the knowledge and resources these provide can be leveraged to respond to the specific interests and needs of each locality in a more relevant way. Thus, incubators distribute responsibilities and build capacity so that there is more innovation in the field of development, their resources are better allocated, and their impact is multiplied.

Some incubators bring together, orchestrate or coordinate networks of experts, decision-makers, donors, professionals and other actors who can contribute some of the necessary resources to support other projects (funds, training, skill development, etc.). Some invest resources and training in projects that can help them achieve a specific objective in different regions, or within several populations and communities (such as providing sanitation or health care, for example). And within these, some provide support through a matching funds scheme: they “match” the value of the different contributions that the projects themselves are able to provide (hours of work, materials, infrastructure, etc.) with economic resources, which encourages the project in question to make the most of their own resources and become more self-sufficient. Others promote entrepreneurship projects to strengthen the capacity of beneficiary communities to solve problems with less dependence on external resources. And some decide to provide seed capital to development proposals that they believe have good potential. When incubating projects, many initiatives are careful to design an exit plan so that, over time, the projects they support can become independent and run on their own.