SUNY Oswego to launch “community incubator” in April

OSWEGO – SUNY Oswego plans to roll out a “community incubator” initiative next month to engage business, government, education, human services, and nonprofits to foster innovation and economic development.

Dubbed “Thrive” this effort by the college’s Office of Business and Community Relations (OBCR) seeks to surpass the role of a business accelerator and become a “community incubator” to nurture social entrepreneurship in the county and possibly beyond, according to a news release from SUNY Oswego.

OBCR will hold a public launch event on April 9 — at 7 p.m. at the Sheldon Hall ballroom on the SUNY Oswego campus — at which Greg Horowitt a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and author from California, will appear. He is co-founder and managing director of T2 Venture Capital, a seed and early-stage venture fund and advisory services firm based in Los Angeles.

Community stakeholders then will meet with Horowitt for two days to brainstorm and exchange ideas for developing a community blueprint over the next year to provide direction for the project, SUNY Oswego says.

Horowitt, in his co-authored book “The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley,” championed a Rainforest theory — all communities have the potential to achieve Silicon Valley-like success by creating an ecosystem that encourages innovation.

Jeff Grimshaw, director of OBCR, said he believes incorporating the book’s theory could greatly benefit the economy and the community.

“If you use that model with economic development, you create the environment for innovation,” Grimshaw said in the release. “Economics, history, our physical environs, our government — that’s our environment that we could impact if we take the model of community incubators and engage all levels of the community: business, government, education, human services, nonprofits — everyone who makes us who we are in Central New York.”

The Thrive incubator is one of the several community-engagement programs at SUNY Oswego, according to the release. The school’s Enactus program, for example, has students work with the county’s Health Department on business-plan design. And, the Mentor Oswego project pairs college students with eighth-graders in the Oswego City School District to help decrease the high-school dropout rate.

SUNY Oswego is one of 13 university colleges in the 64-campus SUNY system with 8,000 enrolled students and 110 academic programs. The school contends on its website that it generates $180 million in total economic impact on Oswego County and $345 million total economic impact on Central New York.

Contact The Business Journal at news@cnybj.com