Sydney University’s Incubate entrepreneurial program begins national rollout with Adelaide

Incubate, a start-up accelerator program launched and piloted by Sydney University, has announced its first partnership with Adelaide University set to run an Incubate program from January 2014.

The national expansion of the award-winning entrepreneurial education program is supported by Google Australia.

Students in the Incubate program receive 11 weeks of co-working space, mentoring, workshops and $5000.

The Adelaide program will be coordinated by lecturer Claudia Szabo and include mentoring from Google Australia’s engineering director Alan Noble, Freelancer founder Matt Barrie and serial entrepreneur and venture capital investor Dr Michelle Deaker.

“This is a great opportunity for our students. It will open up fantastic entrepreneurship avenues. We are very excited to be hosting this program,” Szabo says.

National program coordinator James Alexander told StartupSmart they’re midway through negotiations with universities in every state and are thrilled to partner with Adelaide University as their first program in the national roll out.

“We were very happy when Adelaide University wanted to be partner, as I’m constantly meeting entrepreneurs who are from Adelaide. There is something in the water down there,” Alexander says.

The Incubate team are looking forward to piloting the program in another university context. Alexander says their key questions are about developing the program so it fits well.

“The big question for us is can a university host an accelerator program successfully without having to build up the infrastructure that usually accompanies university programs, such as a dedicated commercialisation department, or raising a fund,” Alexander says.

He adds the two programs will be sharing resources and mentors, and they have several live-stream mentoring sessions scheduled.

“It’ll be great to see network effects of having two programs running across major cities. We’re looking forward to tapping into the Adelaide start-up mentoring community, and sharing what we’ve learned here,” Alexander says.

He adds they’re midway through negotiations with universities in every state, and are looking forward to announcing further partnerships shortly.

“We’ve got pretty ambitious plans and now it’s only a question of timelines,” Alexander says.