Last year in DK, governments incubators held a total of 310 portfolio companies. 15 were sold or terminated, only 3 with ‘some’ success (i.e. ‘some’ positive return). Not very impressive! This repeats the trend from previous years, and they say the ‘crisis’ is to blame. Perhaps, they could learn from Steve Blank who states that “any government that starts public financing entrepreneurship better have a plan to get out” – and argues that “if governments are still publicly funding startups after five to ten years they’ve failed”.
Steve Blank “spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.
1) They sure killed a ton of trees
2) With one noticeable exception, governmental entrepreneurship policies and initiatives appear to be less than optimal, with capital deployed inefficiently (read “They would have done better throwing the money in the street.”) Why? Because they haven’t defined the basics:
What’s a startup? Who’s an entrepreneur? How do the ecosystems differ for each one? What’s the role of public versus private funding?” http://goo.gl/nxiyO