1013.2

Direct Support in Solving Problems

The innovation office and incubators support the startup process with external expert advice and resources, with the aim of solving concretely identified problems. It could be an idea-owner in a pre-incubator phase or later a startup team that needs technical or business expertise to solve immanent problems. Thus, the innovation office and incubators provide—with their own resources or through intermediation with external consultants—concrete advice on legal intellectual property issues as well as production techniques and the like: problems where relevant parameters are known and can be identified and calculated as a basis for the advice given.

102D. Hjalmarsson

Coaching Along the Startup Process

As the empirical description of praxis has shown, it is not regarded as sufficient to provide direct support to solving identified problems. The innovation office can support the idea-owner in the early phase, and incubators—as with UBI—can offer full service support. Each project is given a designated coach that facilitates the case and the work ahead, and deals with practical and strategic questions. Hence, it is equally important to facilitate the whole startup process, to take the project all the way to economic and social realization of a business deal. For eXpression it is to “help the artists to release their inner entrepreneur.”

3.4

Networking and Providing Creative Arenas

Much of the activities in the innovation support system concern networking, bridgebuilding, and providing creative arenas. The innovation office arranges different kinds of gatherings and seminars and other campus activities in order to nudge the utilization of activities. The incubators arrange different events where people from the business community meet and mingle with academic entrepreneurs. In Uminova Innovation, this is to build “Community and Culture” and eXpression talks about an “environment of co-creation and community.” The aim expressed in all incubators is to enable creative meetings in which startup entrepreneurs or startup teams can extend their business networks in order to further refine their business ideas.

One challenge for these organizations is to construct an organizational structure that effectively maintains and enhances these support processes over time. The basic support processes identified in this chapter have been summarized in four different categories: Nudging, direct support, coaching, and creating arenas. The different activities take place in four different organizational structures: In the innovation office and in each of the three incubators. Figure 2 illustrates the challenge. Each part of the innovation support system has its own specialties: In short, a focus on