What is an Incubator?

An Incubator is a mentored, structured pathway to help new ideas and approaches emerge with the best possibility of coming to life.  It is common in the business world, but less so in Education.  For the first time, aspiring school planters can obtain expert advice, develop their plans and visions in a supportive environment, and connect to support, expertise, and resources. 

Beginning Planters

Visioning - a series of seminars and online resources for new school planters

• The vision and need for Christian school planting
• Need-finding, and School Opportunity Identification (social trends, demography, etc)
• Ideation - Finding and forming the idea of a new campus, and its value proposition
• Design Team Thinking for idea verification & concepting
• Proposal selection process
• Team and partner identification
• Legal Identities, compliance and relationships
• Forming a Business Plan
• Strategies for Lean Startups and Under-design

Forming - a series of face to face, iterative development experiences mentored by experienced school planters

• Orientation
• Mentor Mixer
• Running a successful school/ being a founder (Personal Skills and Attributes)
• Product/ Market Fit
• People and Teams
  
• Negotiation skills
• Workplace Organization
• Promotional Strategy, Branding and Press, Sales and Marketing

​

• Raising Capital – financial connections - Raising initial finance
• Office Hours
• Pitching your school to partners
• Pitch Day - the new school ‘Shark Tank’
• What’s next?

Planting - a mentored pre- and post-plant framework for surviving and thriving

• Skills and knowledge formation
• Systems and structures
• Partnership formation
• Mentoring for the longer term
• The life-long leadership pathway.

Stages in Planting

Ideation Stage






Concepting Stage









​Commitment Stage













Validation Stage





Scaling Stage



Establishment stage

For Experienced Planters

Ide01a - Creating Space for innovative thinking
Ide01b: Retrain school cultures and governance  Ide01c: Provide nimble, affordable services directly to identified ‘high innovation’ School Boards
Ide02: Establishing training and mentoring processes for future NSP principals and connect them to centres of best practice
Ide04: Economic and financial alternatives, modelling and training in NSP for schools and Boards

Con01a: New leadership training approaches, linked to promotions, advancement, and financial capacity of the school.
Con01b: Using modular ‘School in a box’ curricula and systems.
Con02: Addressing HR sustainability issues.
Con03: Refining and spreading the NSP mission
Con04: Relating to Planners and Regulators.

Com01: Building social capital within 'parent' school and partner networks.











Val01: Real Asset planning and management





Scal02 – Mission orientation and growth pipeline model and exploitation
Scal03a: Solving the Problems of growth
Scal03b: Identifying new sources of development capital
Scal04: Building momentum and speed to market 

Est01: Resources for growth