In the 1980s, the term “business incubator” relatively new. But this did not mean the concept could not be found, or something pretty close to it. When Jim Hayward was looking for space for his UK company, Biocompatibles, “I looked for university-affiliated space, and we found it. They didn’t call it an incubator. They spoke about clusters in those days,” on both sides of the Atlantic. “The clusters were focused by science. Italy had one kind of cluster, [and there was] an optics cluster in Rochester, in New York.”
