Business incubators began in the 1960s and really took off in the late 1990s as support for startup companies who need advice and venture capital to get their ideas off the ground. As the dot-com bubble burst, many high-tech business incubators did so too. Now the model of a business incubator is changing. Several of the incubator companies who survived the dot-com bubble switched to a virtual model.[1]
The old incubator model required a start up venture to set-up shop at the incubators site. The virtual model, on the other hand, allows a company to garner the advice of an incubator without actually being located at the incubator site. This new model suits those entrepreneurs who need the advice an incubator offers but still want to maintain their own offices, warehouses, etc.
Several state and local governments in the US are working with or creating their own virtual business incubators to attract new business.
One of the recent additions to the virtual business incubator scene is One Million by One Million,[2] a Silicon Valley based global initiative aimed to help a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond, thereby establishing a framework for Capitalism 2.0.[3]