Small Business Incubators:
What's Work Got to Do With It?

mericans have a love-hate relationship with business. We have romantic images of the Main Street merchant who knows us and what we like, but we drive miles from our homes to find a wider selection and cheaper prices for what we buy.
    Our public policy decisions support programs that encourage business development and produce jobs, but we wonder if the resources should go instead to feed hungry children or fill potholes in the streets or research cures to disease. We debate whether the dollars should simply stay in individual hands in the first place, rather than becoming part of a shared pool of dollars intended for public benefit.
    For this issue of Community Reinvestment, we talked with entrepreneurs in business and in nonprofit organizations who have shaped their work to fit their lives and their communities. We visited one of the best business development centers in the country, and talked with tenants and graduates of the center's business incubator. We toured the businesses of two incubator graduates whose businesses now operate in an international arena.

  Some of us try to separate our work life from "real" life, while others define ourselves through the work we do. We watch the hands of a clock creep toward quitting time, or we lose track of time as we pursue an idea or race to meet a deadline. Our disenchantment with jobs is reflected in the popularity of comic strips such as Dilbert, Geech and Cathy.
    In Grand Junction, we found people who love their work and who make that work one part of a full life. We don't necessarily have answers to how to integrate work into a balanced personal life or how to answer the difficult public policy questions about how to best use our resources. We invite our readers to join us, however, in exploring a successful business support center where the dollars are leveraged to meet individual and community needs. We offer you an opportunity to meet entrepreneurs who are creating jobs for themselves and others, and to consider with us the ideas of innovative leaders about what makes a successful business incubator work.
    For subscribers of Community Reinvestment, included in this mailing are proceedings from our December, 1996 conference on Financing Rural America. Access to capital is a critical issue for small business everywhere, but is often of particular concern in rural America, where isolation can be a major barrier to business development

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