Seed funding

Because we provide seed funding for start-ups, lots of people come to us with a one-page business idea, or even one that is still in their heads. I talked to about two different prospective business founders a week on average, often via an informal chat or phone call. Many would-be entrepreneurs never made it past this stage, either because they had already left ST and did not qualify, or because they were not willing to quit their jobs - they wanted a stake in their own business without risking unemployment. 

The third investment. Scalable Systems (http //www.scalablesys. com/), came to Incubators Work via the incubator s internal business plan competition, which was started in 2000. The competition was open to any venture that had at least one person presently on the staff of an ST company, and the prize for the winner was guaranteed seed funding of S 500,000 from Incubators Work if the business was launched. The competition regularly attracted 15-20 entries per year, but Scalable Systems was the first entrant that ended up in the Incubators Work portfolio. Thia comments ... 

Tools for research include research facilities, faculty recruitment, endowed chairs, seed funds, centers, and initiatives. 

The Advanced Purchase Commitments approach proposed by Kremer and Glennerster (2004) and the Center for Global Development (2005) has attracted considerable public attention as well as seed funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years. Advanced purchase commitments could be useful for certain types of pharmaceutical products, principally vaccines, to stimulate research by promising a subsidy of a fixed value per unit for a given number of units. The most attractive candidate product for such a commitment is a malaria vaccine, since the health (and economic) benefits from an effective malaria vaccine could be very large. 

Business plan competitions are now a weU-proven tool for surfacing ideas for new businesses in both a regional and a corporate context (Fig. 9.3). In one American life sciences company, for example, 1000 ideas were generated. These were turned into 100 business plans, of which 56 received seed funding. In a business plan competition, participants develop a fuUy-fledged business plan, usually in three phases from the initial description of the business idea to concrete details such as the appointment of the management team and a financial plan (Fig. 9.4). 

This work was supported by Seed Funds from the Stanford Center for Integrated Systems. The authors thank Ford Motor Company for use of the fluorescence microscope and imaging system, and Professor C.W. Bates, Stanford Dept, of Materials Science and Engineering, for use of the Solartron frequency response analyzer. 

This work is supported in part by the Research Opportunity Incentive Seed Fund from the University of Florida and a grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) via Micro/Nano Fluidics Fundamentals Focus Center at the University of California at Irvine. We would like to thank our colleagues Carl Fredrickson, Wei Lian, and Andrew Simon for their contribution cited in this chapter. 

A one million Yuan (about 150,000) seed fund has been estabUshed for high-tech startup companies 300,000 RMB per company is available to support IPOs Favorable rents and energy allowances... 

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