The National Business Incubator Association (NBIA) is basically a national association of business incubators: unsurprising, given their name. Their website is extremely informative, including both superficial FAQ answers for people in a hurry and a complete archive of their articles.

The NBIA carried out a study in 1996 to determine best practices for incubators that could be applied to any incubator regardless of focus or mission (their words), and boiled things down to two basic principles, and I quote (from here):

1. The incubator aspires to have a positive impact on its community's economic health by maximizing the success of emerging companies.
2. The incubator itself is a dynamic model of a sustainable, efficient business operation.

Those sound like pretty good advice to me. They further ramify those principles into the following general guidelines; the management of an incubator should strive to (and here I paraphrase for brevity):

• Define the incubator’s role in the community, obtain consensus on that role, and develop a strategic plan to achieve the program's mission
• Structure for financial sustainability
• Place management emphasis on helping the clients: this includes proactive guidance to help them succeed (i.e. manage both the incubator and the incubatees)
• Develop a facility, resources, methods and tools that effectively address the developmental needs of each company
• Integrate the incubator into the fabric of the community
• Develop a resource network
• Collect statistics and other information for ongoing program evaluation, based on quantitative metrics of the strategic plan

Read the NBIA's own article for a little more detail and more careful precision, but the upshot is this: manage the incubator well, pay attention to the good of the community, support the startups first and foremost, and learn from what you do.

In terms of the fourth point there, though, I had a thought. When I started my houseblog at Blogspot, I just filled in a form, and it was set up and I started writing. When I set up this site here at Drupal Café, I filled in a form, and it was set up and (with some more flailing around) I started writing. Here's the thought: starting a business should be precisely that easy. Managing a business should be just that easy; at most, you would customize the basic framework. Perhaps this is not a new idea. If it is, though, an open-source business plan system should definitely be part of any incubator, including this one.

The second thought rattling around in my head was this: remember Cambrian House, "home of Crowdsourcing"? For about a year or so (correct me if I'm wrong on this) they ran a kind of ongoing virtual incubator that provided collaboration tools to small groups, allowed voting on ideas and stuff, and then they would offer VC contacts to the best of those. Then they morphed into a more traditional VC in their local market, if I recall correctly (I wasn't really paying attention during that phase).

Why wouldn't that process work as a filter for any incubator? The initial exploratory thinking could be done virtually; once you needed to get together and get serious, you'd move into the Brick House and go 24x7 with hot and cold pizza on tap, etc. Once you got through that stage and still hadn't killed one another, you'd have a stable little company, and you'd shop it around for capital. There's a whole spectrum of developmental stages there.

Moreover, if you have open-source business structures on tap, with best-practice development workflows and even the accounting set up in advance before you ever need it, then all the boring stuff is out of the way. Note, here: it's usually the boring stuff like business organization and accounting that kills an otherwise good business idea. We know it's boring. Why duplicate it?

As usual, this is your cue to tell me how I'm stupid, count the ways. Go ahead. I can take it. See that comments link there? I dare you.