New Business Incubator Focuses on Veterans

Veterans Incubator for Better Entrepreneurship

 

This entrepreneur training center offers a unique approach to helping veterans develop their talents and connect their military training to their civilian livelihoods.

UW Tacoma is launching a business startup incubator that opens a new chapter in the university’s support for South Sound entrepreneurial activity.

VIBE, or Veterans Incubator for Better Entrepreneurship, taps into several regional assets—motivated veterans, a supportive community, a university setting—with the goal of supporting students as they learn about entrepreneurship and turn their ideas into viable businesses.

As VIBE director Phil Potter says, “VIBE’s role is to be the institutional anchor in the entrepreneurial ecosystem here in the South Sound region.”

VIBE’s focus on veterans as entrepreneurs is in keeping with UW Tacoma’s mission as an urban-serving university. As U.S. engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, more and more military personnel are concluding their active duty at Joint Base Lewis McChord and returning to civilian life. As part of the military’s commitment to a smooth and successful transition, JBLM and UW Tacoma leaders recognized that enhancing the region’s start-up culture would provide more options to a group of men and women well-suited to the entrepreneurial life.

“If you look at the set of characteristics of what veterans are and what good entrepreneurs are, they match up really well,” said Potter. “Both groups understand when to lead and when to follow; both are very driven and disciplined; both are very innovative; and both know the feeling of austerity. At the end of the day, they just get things done.”

VIBE’s focus is on developing talent and creating a start-up culture in the context of an educational environment. “VIBE is all about very early stage startups,” said Potter. “It’s really more about the entrepreneur than it is about their business. We’re almost ‘pre-stage’—the early idea stage. We’re there to make sure the educational experience shapes the business ideas and shapes the way the students think about delivering products, technologies and services. That’s our role.”

VIBE, located on the third floor of the new Tioga Library Building on the UW Tacoma campus, creates a collaborative space where student entrepreneurs can meet with each other and with mentors and successful business leaders to work through the myriad of decisions necessary to refining a business idea. Shem Zakem, one of VIBE’s first student-entrepreneurs, said that access to mentors and coaches “really helps us hone in on what we’re doing and focus our attention on something that will be effective, rather than continuous brainstorming to no end result.”

Many other incubator programs across the country put students through one- or three-week “boot camps,” but VIBE recognizes that entrepreneurship can’t be taught as a series of checklists and project management frameworks. Through formal sessions and informal interactions, by arrangement and through serendipity, VIBE students will benefit from their own variety of backgrounds and the unexpected connections that come through continuous networking and relationship-building.

Through the generosity of the Dimmer Family Foundation, a major focus of VIBE’s quest to develop the talent of student entrepreneurs will be a business plan competition, with cash awards for winning entries. “It’s very unusual—almost unheard of—for a new incubator to be able to hit the ground running with a funded competition. We’re very fortunate that our community recognizes and supports what we’re trying to do,” said VIBE director Phil Potter.