As former chair of the Long Island Regional Incubator Task Force and current tenant of the biotech incubator at Stony Brook, Jim Hayward has a lot of experience with how to get the most out of a business incubator, on Long Island and elsewhere.
Jim Hayward, interviewed via Zoom on June 28, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
Antoinette: I think you mentioned you were the chair of the Long Island Regional Incubator Task. Can you tell me a little bit more about this organization? The goal is to promote precisely this in the region, right?
Jim: Yes. The goal was to recommend policies for the management of incubators and to recommend a strategy for Long Island. What should we be incubating in?
Antoinette: How do the specifics of Long Island as a place to do business play into this?
Jim: At the time, I was also a member of the LIA so that I was exposed to many aspects of regional commerce. They had done a study that showed that there were five areas of business focus at the time. Biotech was one of them, I think printing was another, certainly no longer is, and aeronautics was another. A lot has changed.
Antoinette: This is back in the ’80s when Grumman was still basically there and the Cold War hadn’t ended yet, and all the aerospace business hadn’t evaporated quite yet?
Jim: Yes. We took what we could from those studies, and also I visited a number of incubators around the world and tried to really comprehend what was best about each.
Antoinette: What did you find were successful strategies that could be applied around here?
Jim: Say it again?
Antoinette: When you visited the incubators worldwide, when you were collecting this information, what were your insights from that in terms of things that other people were doing in other countries that could be applied effectively on Long Island?
Jim: Some of them are very simple. Getting things done.
Antoinette: Always a good business strategy.
Jim: Yes, and it’s not intuitive to many people. A postdoc is used to a different kind of pressure where productivity is measured in weeks or months. In a corporate environment, very often productivity is measured in hours because you have deliverables that have to get out by the end of the week. Could be a document, a research document, or it could be a product. Not only teaching the members of my own companies how to do that but then influencing other companies as well and trying to be an asset for them. There were times when we would install expensive equipment and share it with everyone in the incubator, autoclaves, or air compressors for clean air or big stills, water for injection.
The sister- and brotherhood that develops in an incubator can be very important. Also sometimes the availability of cash, we would occasionally invest in other incubator companies just to help out.