By Sierra LaDuke
UBI Global recently named SEED SPOT one of the top six incubators in the country- how cool is that?! Just as incubators accelerate entrepreneurs, UBI Global helps incubators become more efficient. UBI picked their top six after benchmarking the progress of incubators around the country.
“Benchmarking can help us understand best practices across social incubators and, in turn, help us make them better and create more jobs. Establishing a benchmark also enables the surfacing and sharing of data-driven best practices in order to catalyze a network of incubators for social innovation.”
SBI’s sample included 24 incubators from 16 different states. Keep reading to see the breakdown of how SEED SPOT did in our benchmark performance!
SBI identified our key strengths:
The large number of contacts we have with major corporations (expand)
Our attraction of large amounts of funds from microcredit and crowdsourcing platforms (expand)
SBI also pointed out the areas we can improve:
We should spend more time on coaching/mentoring activities in order to have more profitable clients.
We need to have more international partners and sponsors. This might increase the number of non local beneficiaries (which is 0 right now).
The analysis showed that SEED SPOT performs above par on the economic impact indicator because of the high number of jobs that we have been created in result of the full-time and evening programs. We also scored above average in the social impact category for that same reason!
We’re excited to report that our best-scoring category was in “Value for Client.” Following close behind is, “access to network indicators,” which can be credited to our large investor network.
We’re really grateful to have been given this in-depth performance review by UBI Global. They recommend that SEED SPOT works on spending more time on mentoring activities along with finding international sponsors and partners to, “attract a better deal flow.”
