🔒A ‘Hatchery’ for student entrepreneurs: Foundation grant helps launch COA’s venture incubator

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A donation to College of the Atlantic's business incubator will allow an unusual program to graduate from its scraping-by status to a permanent place in the curriculum.

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, honoring a Mount Desert Island summer resident, has given $1.5 million to the program, which the college calls “The Hatchery.”

On the scenic campus of this small, alternative college of about 350 students, where space is at a premium, The Hatchery is located in a refurbished tennis shed.

“It's our version of the Silicon Valley garage,” jokes Jay Friedlander, who runs the program.

The Hatchery gives COA students a chance to start a business and earn college credit in an interdisciplinary environment. Since the program was established in 2010, efforts have focused on alternative energy, advocacy, food systems and the creative economy. Each student admitted into the program receives up to $5,000 in seed capital and has access to mentors, lawyers, accountants, designers and public relations professionals.

Friedlander arrived at COA seven years ago to found the college's Sustainable Business Program. He previously served as chief operating officer for the former O'Naturals Inc., a Falmouth-based natural and organic fast-food restaurant group. He's also worked with senior executives of Fortune 500 companies as a strategy consultant, developing and implementing global brand experiences and customer-centered growth strategies for clients that included Citigroup.

Friedlander defines sustainable business in terms of abundance.

“What you're looking for is enterprise — for-profit, nonprofit, little businesses, huge businesses — that creates abundance for the environment, for society, and also as a business,” he says. “You're looking for the trifecta: How do you grow an enterprise that is financially robust and, as it grows, helps with issues such as resource usage and social capital? How do you create a business that's a positive win on all sides, as opposed to the old industrial model that takes from nature, grinds it up, spits out a product and doesn't know where that product goes at the end of its life?”

A class, not a club

The idea for The Hatchery was sparked by students taking his business planning class.

“They said, 'This is great. Now we'd like to start this business. Where can we do that?' Six months later, we had The Hatchery up and running,” Friedlander says.

Six months is “lighting speed” for getting a college program off the ground, he says.

Many college campuses host business incubators, and COA's shares commonalities with them, such as office space, mentorship and start-up capital, he says.

COA's program is different. Elsewhere, incubators are co-curricular offerings, more like clubs, and students must fit that activity into a full schedule of classes. At COA, The Hatchery is a regular, for-credit class.

“At COA, you can start an enterprise because of your education,” he says. “At most other colleges, the other way to look at it is you have to do it despite your education.”

The for-credit aspect makes a lot of sense, he says.

“When students start a venture, it's inherently what they're passionate about,” he says. “Because they're passionate about it, they're going to spend more time on it. And then you can bring in the theory, and it's going to be much more meaningful. There aren't many schools, I've found, that are doing that.”

Another unique aspect is The Hatchery's invitation to students to stay on for another nine months once the class has ended, so they can continue to build their network and utilize the resources they've cultivated. And other incubators don't host the diverse mix of projects seen at The Hatchery, he says.

“At other schools, you won't find this combination of non-profit, for-profit, advocacy and international development, all in one space,” Friedlander says.

A program boot-strapped with grants

In its first year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development program granted $73,501 to establish the incubator. The program subsequently received $100,000 from the W.P. Carey Foundation, $10,000 from the Fisher Charitable Foundation and $70,000 in private donations. The money funded set-up necessities like furniture and computers and, for several years, a part-time staffer. It also provided start-up capital for student projects.

Up to now, the pool of start-up capital has varied year to year. It was $20,000 to $30,000 the first couple of years.

After that, “we were scraping by,” Friedlander says.

Friedlander expects the grant from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation will yield roughly $75,000 a year, which will provide $30,000 a year for start-up capital. It will also pay the salary for a three-quarter staffer and provide funds for outreach and equipment. Enrollment in the course is expected to be six or seven students.

Over the 10-week course, students develop a market-testable rapid prototype of their business, while also studying the fundamentals of business. The curriculum — in itself a Hatchery project of sorts — has gone through substantial revision from Day 1.

“We were trying to figure out what are the essential pieces any entrepreneur needs to know for operating a business,” Friedlander says. “The trick with The Hatchery is that some students come in with many business courses, and others don't. So you need material that's robust enough to bring people up from different levels.”

While the success of most incubators and accelerators is measured by the number of businesses launched, Friedlander has three measures of success. The launch of the intended business, of course, is one. But a student might also travel down that path and find it branches into an alternative endeavor. Or, she might abandon the idea all together. But in all three cases, students come away with skills that can be universally applied in future endeavors.

Lilyanna Sollberger is a case in point. Currently in San Francisco for an internship with an alternative beverage company, she graduated this past spring from The Hatchery, where she developed recipes and marketing ideas for “jun,” a type of fermented tea.

“A lot of The Hatchery is putting into practice your ideas and testing them to see if they will work in the real world,” says Sollberger. “For me, the rapid prototypes involved creating a line of six flavors, designing the labels and testing them through a series of blind tastings.”

Although that particular project is on hold now, Sollberger found it useful to immerse herself in the business world.

“Even if you decide not to go ahead with the venture, you'll still have completed an amazing term of learning about business, which you can use to develop any venture,” she says. “It's a model of how to approach entrepreneurship.”

Friedlander estimates roughly one venture per year continues as an entity beyond The Hatchery, although not necessarily in the same form. These include ventures started by Jordan Motzkin and Nick Harris. Motzkin, as part of The Hatchery's inaugural group, started a venture he called Big Box Farms, which received seed funding through the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture to grow produce inside industrial warehouses located near food distribution facilities, allowing the company to bring sustainable local agriculture to densely populated areas. Ultimately, said Friedlander, Motzkin took what he learned about the art of pitching Big Box Farms and started an additional company called PitchWorks, today based in New York City and doing early-stage consulting work.

In 2010, Nick Harris and other students began exploring the conversion through fermentation of food waste into butanol as a gasoline alternative. They formed Gourmet Butanol LLC and won $30,000 in grants from NASA's Maine Space Grant Consortium, the Libra Future Fund, the Environmental Protection Agency P3 program and the University of Southern Maine, along with seed money from The Hatchery.

As an assistant instructor at Colorado Mountain College, Harris went on to design and aid in the construction of a bio-butanol facility, coordinated the installation of a pilot-scale butanol facility and helped develop an educational biofuel program. He is now studying for his Ph.D in microbiology at the University of California in Berkeley.

“Butanol is just as good as gasoline, but burns cleaner and moves your car further down the road per gallon,” says Harris. “But it's very difficult to make. You make it using fermentation using a species of bacteria that's finicky and can't grow in oxygen.”

Currently, he says, the Colorado group is exploring the production of ethanol. Harris isn't certain where his studies will take him, although he'll continue in the field of fermentation, his great passion. He views his experience with The Hatchery, and COA in general, as an excellent foundation for understanding how to realize an idea.

“The entire business program at COA taught me to be innovative,” Harris says. “It taught me to question why the world is the way it is and to try to figure out ways to make improvements.”

Other Hatchery projects over the years are hugely diverse. Just a few include an initiative to develop a U.S. market for custom-embroidered work from Afghanistan, a community solar project, a program to provide families in MDI's food assistance programs with local, organic vegetables and a student furniture-maker's development of relationships with weavers and wood harvesters in Mexico. Each project stems from student interest.

“When students are doing things they're passionate about, they work even harder,” says Friedlander. “This gives them real-world experience. There's much more learning involved than you could get just by reading a book. The books are important, but being informed and also taking action is an incredible combination.”

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