Birmingham Incubator - A project for 2018

in #marketing7 years ago (edited)

This is both a thought experiment, and an appeal for people to join the project.

What?
An physical space & a state of mind.
It will be a project to help break people out of limiting beliefs, to retrain, to start businesses, to invent, to create, to RE-invent & RE-create. To innovate. Our raw materials will be those who need help reaching their potential. Our outputs will be people who start projects and eventually outgrow the incubator.

A mix of co-working space, workshop, support network, meeting space, retail space, start-up incubator and venture capitalist.

I envisage a disused industrial space (which are abundant in the West Midlands). Let’s re-purpose these beautiful spaces instead of them just being demolished for yet another ‘exclusive luxury apartment development’. I see a large open-plan warehouse space with substantial yard. It just needs to be secure and not leak at the beginning. The B’Inc will ‘bootstrap’ i.e it will be mainly self-funding.

Why?
It’s needed. Too many (most) people never get close to fulfilling their potential. This I believe is behind much of the inequality in this country. The poor are taught for 12 years in government indoctrination camps what their role is to be -workers, consumers. Your ambition should be to be judged and pass exams so you can be judged at an interview to start working clicking a mouse in an office and be judged yearly by your 'betters'. Nooooooo, we are better than this. Let's not play their games!

TV culture reinforces this with the endless talent contests where the great unwashed come to have their business, baking, dancing, cooking, singing, attractiveness judged by their 'betters.'

This is Birmingham, 'City of a 1000 Trades'… let’s see this happen again. The world in general & work in particular is changing rapidly, currently Birmingham is failing in IT’S potential to help it’s people thrive. The trades are going to be totally different than 150 years ago. Instead of bicycles, guns, pins, pens, jewellery, sewing machines, steam engines, we'll be building Apps running on Steemit, re-purposing or retrofitting buildings and materials to collect or store green energy, creating great art, literature and on & on.

We have an ‘Innovation Centre’ in this city that’s run by ‘dinosaurs’ that wouldn’t know ‘innovation’ if it bit them on the bum! They operate out of a state-of-the-art building funded by the taxpayer and some of the current projects they proudly boast include an 'online auction website'. Yup...innovative.

Let's bootstrap our own incubator.

How?
A token sale to raise funds? A friendly council member or developer allowing us use of premises? First, I need to generate a team to help me.

When?
Now!

Who?
The bIrmingham Incubator will be for everyone who needs it.

  • The young man I met a few weeks ago (at a bitcoin conference!) who’s dream was getting a job on the nightshift in a supermarket!
  • The refugee newly arrived with her family with no English or capital
  • The 50 year old former factory worker recently made redundant and put on 'the scrap heap'
  • The mother of two who wants to write a novel while the kids are at school
  • The highschool 'failures' who didn't pass their exams
  • The recent graduates with £50,000 in student loans who've suddenly realised they're now expected to apply for soul-crushing office jobs paying £21,000 a year (before tax).
  • The serial inventor who doesn't know how to get his project started
  • The entrepreneur with the burning desire and ideas, but who needs cheap space to start from and access to a vibrant 'talent pool.'

I could go on writing this list all day!

The core team:
Me. A homeopath with an expanding practice and a passion for innovation and cryptocurrency.
Others with complimentary skills
Maybe a city council representative that will smooth planning decisions and secure grant funding
Techies & marketing gurus.

Where?
Some disused industrial warehouse with yard within a few miles of the city centre. Open plan industrial space that can be flexible depending on who needs it. A few catering projects? Let's install an industrial kitchen. Storage needed for a trader? Let's place some shipping containers inside for them.

So What's Next?
I want to recruit a core team for the project, and I need to find both funding and the physical building to house it.

Let's do this and create a perfect venue for Steemfest4

Questions? Ideas? Thoughts? Offers of Help or collaboration?

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This sounds really exciting @alanfreestone. Would be interested to talk more about how I could be involved

Hi @helesoutar your ears must have been burning as I was talking about bringing my better half to you for a bit of life-coaching. Maybe you have more contacts than me to start building a team around this project? I see an accountant, web-developer, video editor and other skill-sets being invaluable. Builder even! Lawyer etc. What where your initial thoughts about how you'd like to be involved?

Ah, so that's why I suddenly felt an urge to come check out my steemit feed! Happy to put some feelers out with my contacts. My strongest area is strategy - working out exactly what the desired outcomes are and then working out how to make them happen - so I'm happy to offer my time for that.

Going forward, my initial thought was that to get the best from an incubator you'd need a team of advisors for those who move in, to give them the necessary support to get their businesses and ideas off the ground, something I'd be interested in being a part of

Yes I agree, you'd be a good fit. Last year I got talking to some really young (19?)guys that were starting a digital marketing company. They were hopeless, they were trying to network but didn't collect my details or have a business card to give me. Afterwards I was like 'damn, I wish I could mentor them or something'....I even had a plan to build their agency.
They could pick a business in the area, let's say a chimney sweep, & offer to build them a decent website & sort out the digital marketing for free, no obligation. They'd just earn commission on any NEW business generated & be allowed to use the biz as a case study of their work. It would be little effort to optimise the Google visibility of the biz (as everyone else is terrible at it), and get some decent reviews posted on Google and hey-presto! Instead they were trying to get commissioned for a monthly fee to do your dig. marketing...but they had no track record. What would people be paying for? Anyway I'm rambling but it would be the type of people I imagine helping with the B'ham Incubator.

Yes, it's such a massive learning curve starting a business, isn't it? So many different aspects, that have absolutely nothing to do with your key skills often, need to be mastered quickly. I was really lucky to get places on SPEED and EFS whilst I was still at uni and got a lot of mentoring through that. So many of these programs disappeared when all the RDA's were closed though - definitely time to restart!

Hi @alanfreestone,

I live in London and very interested,
please keep me updated on the project.

Thank you :)

Why are you interested? Do you want to use the space, or do you wish to be involved in it's creation?

This sounds amazing. I thought this project challenging for a homeopath dealing usually with micro doses. I wish you much success like you have in your medical praxis.