Bangalore: This year will see exciting new age startups, who will bring changes through their product or service offerings. More and more young innovators will step in the shoes of entrepreneurs. However, some of them lack the infrastructure, and some desire to get mentorship to better understand and develop their innovative ideas. Here step in the incubation centers that have helped to transform a large number of vague ideas into successful companies. Incubation centers not only design programs to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services, they also develop and orchestrate such companies by offering mentorship and their network of contacts.

2012 will witness a large number of incubation centers, nationally and globally, collaborating across different incubators, to offer more focused and state-of-the-art support to the startup entrepreneurs. The number of aspiring ideas from the entrepreneurs are on the rise and they needs to be addressed. “We have a couple of companies with whom we are in discussion with, and expect to close the year with 3-4 new companies. What is important during the screening process is the business plan that they propose,” says Sushanto Mitra, CEO, SINE, IIT-Bombay.

The Startup Centre is a newly formed incubation center. For the current year, their focus will be on technology driven ventures. “We bet to hinge on the entrepreneurs that we get to meet and their visions of what they want to build. We also will continue to bet on people,” says Vijay Anand, Founder, The Startup Centre. The focus of the incubation centers will be on those entrepreneurs who think out of the box and are able to latch onto an insight that everyone else is missing out on. If the team can code or have a co-founder who can code, that will be an advantage for such candidates.

The numbers of incubation centers are on rise, but are not at par with the rise of startups. According to an older study, a startup that has successfully completed the incubation program increases the likelihood that the startup company will stay in business for the long term. 87 percent of incubator graduates have stayed in business, in contrast to 44 percent of all firms.

“The infrastructure and mentorship that we provide across the table to these incubeetes are at par with the real market. Our incubation center provides an array of support that are far important than just providing a reach to the infrastructure and networking. We help the ideas to become a business plan, with very gradual round of mentorship, before these companies are incubated in our incubation center,” says Sachidananda. B S, Manager-Operations, NSRCELL, IIM-Bangalore.

While some incubation centers will look for good business plan, there are few who will look into the management team of the startups. They will opt for those candidates, who have a team rather than a single individual to run the company, which complements the skills to support the organization. On the other hand, for some incubation centers, an execution plan will have an upper hand over the team. The admission of startups to incubation centers will also be based on the execution plan that differentiates the successful companies from the unsuccessful ones, enabling them to scale it the market.

With the usual support of infrastructure and mentoring, incubation centers have opened up their umbrella of networking for these startups to get their initial clients, and many-a-times, even their seed round or angel round of funding. “It is important for the candidates proposing to join an incubation center, to have a concrete plan for the next 2-3 years. They should also be able to propose the timeframe to break-even. We would also prefer to incubate the experienced professionals, who have seen business in the real time, especially entrepreneurs between the age group of 25-40 years,” says A. Balachandran, General Manager, VIT-TBI.

There are few incubation centers, such as SINE, who incubate companies with business model involving the creation and development of an intellectual property. “We are open to incubate companies who have a large market and a well rounded team that can execute its plan. The budding and would-be entrepreneurs have started paying greater attention to financial resources generation as well as marketing,” adds Mitra.

It suddenly looks like everyone is looking at incubators and accelerators as a business model, but are not sure how to go about it. “That is one major change that happened in 2011. I think it is good for the entrepreneurs to have so many options to choose from,” adds Anand.

Incubation centers will become more flexible towards enrolling innovative ideas and would go out of the way promoting. Partnering with international incubation centers will provide a global vision to these incubeetes to scale in the world economy. In order for incubation centers to establish their value, they should provide transparent expectations and data about their program. The ultimate success of any program is going to be a function of their larger ecosystem the created companies participated in.