Hatching Triple-Bottom-Line Startups

As the Hub gets ready to launch its first U.S. office next fall, it got me thinking: Are there other incubators out there for not-only-for-profits? And how do they differ from the conventional kind? The Hub, after all, is really a business incubator, providing office space and community to like-minded social-purpose entrepreneurial types for a small monthly fee.

Basically, there’s a minuscule number of programs, at least when it comes to triple-bottom line companies. (You can count them on a few fingers). But I think the most noteworthy is one run out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School called Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship (BASE). Officially launched in January with financing from the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative, (that’s funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation), it serves 21 North Carolina-based entrepreneurs, companies like Agri-Tech Producers, a Raleigh business developing a process to convert biomass into renewable fuel, and Eastern Carolina Organics, a Pittsboro distributor of locally grown organic produce.

BASE companies don’t get access to physical office space. But they can tap a network of law and accounting firms, investment experts and so on for advice. There’s also a 13-person advisory board of subject matter experts (sustainable development, fund-raising and so on), who host information lunches, among other things. And one of six entrepreneur-coaches is assigned to each BASE member. Plus, MBA students work as consultants. The program isn’t free, but at $600, it’s pretty cheap.

So, how’s it different from normal incubators?

For one thing, the advisor-hosted lunches focus on topics you’d never find at a similar event held at a regular incubator. Next week, there’s one covering such topics as how to use B Corp.’s system for analyzing and rating social-purpose companies–more on that in another post–and how to set up an employee stock ownership plan. (Not something most fledgling startups focus on).

Most important, the mentors and advisors include such people as Henry McKoy, chairman of Fourth- Sector Bancorp, which works with enterprises focused on sustainable development, Lisa Jones Christensen, assistant professor of sustainable enterprise and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler School, and Maria Kingery, co-founder of Southern Energy Management, a Raleigh residential and commercial green-energy consultancy. They help BASE companies address all sorts of concerns startups don’t generally worry about, like branding problems peculiar to triple-bottom-line entrepreneurs.

Obama, by the way, plans to invest $250 million in government funds into business incubators every year. Maybe some of the money should go to developing more programs like BASE.