Path to Accelerated Startup Success: Benefits of tapping into Maryland’s Innovation & Incubation Hubs

Innovation isn’t easy! But that’s the essence of any startup businesses’ path to success – they must continually innovate and evolve. From proposal to profitability is a long road, one often fraught with challenges and obstacles. Thankfully, Maryland’s innovation hubs offer an accelerated path to startup success.

Why Should You Rent Office Space Within an Innovation Hub?

As a fledgling business, you should rent office space in Maryland, and work within an innovation center ecosystem, because it’s a highly effective business proposition to do so. But renting and sharing office spaces, within an innovation center environment, offers other advantages too:

• You’re not alone – you’ll be within a complete ecosystem that fosters innovation and invention
• You’re more agile – because you’ll have all the processes and support systems, to develop and test your vision and ideas under one roof
• You’ll have access to funding sources – since the innovation center can quickly put you in touch with interested financial backers and venture capitalists
• You’ll build your own internal capabilities – because innovation hubs offer a lot of professional and skill building training, guidance and mentorship opportunities

Many startups spend inordinate amounts of time searching, purchasing and renovating their own office space. Business incubation centers help avoid that waste! As a Maryland-based startup, therefore, renting Howard County office space within the Maryland Innovation Center (MIC) might be worth exploring. It’s your opportunity to accelerate your journey from vision to ultimate profitability.

Growth and Profitability Assured

One of the hallmarks of an innovation hub is that they provide fledgling businesses the infrastructure, technology, and expertise necessary to develop the human capital needed for growth and success.  However, before aligning with an innovation center, it’s important for startup businesses to understand what the ecosystem offers them.

Some entities, that support new ventures through the formative stages, predominantly focus on taking a startup visionary’s ideas, and turning them into a marketable product or service. So, what’s wrong with that? Well, an approach like that might help bring the initial vision to life – but it does nothing to incubate the talents and skills within the startup team.

That incubation process is critical for new startups to become self-sustainable in the longer term. Without that self-development, entrepreneurial teams might not have the skills and confidence to continue to manage and grow their startups into profitable businesses by themselves. It’s likely that, because of their over reliance on the experience and expertise of innovation center staff, the startup team will cultivate limited in-house capabilities to innovate and invent by themselves.

Renting or sharing office space in Maryland, within the MIC incubation hub, offers a different opportunity for fledgling businesses to take their visions to the next level.  It occurs through uniquely crafted training and leadership development programs like the Business Revitalization Initiative Through Entrepreneurship (BRITE). The centers’ experienced staff help fledgling business teams develop in-house skills, through mentoring newbie entrepreneurs, to teaching them the intricacies of product development and marketing, to making convincing investor and sales pitches. This support makes startup teams self-reliant, while also accelerating the process from innovation through commercialization.