Who Should Apply
The principal mission of the NH-ICC is to create sustainable, high-value, private-sector jobs in New Hampshire by nurturing the development and commercialization of technology and other innovations within the state. To create an ecosystem that supports this activity on an ongoing basis, stakeholders, including inventors, management teams, investors, business partners and employees all need to get appropriate returns for their efforts. Keeping this in mind, it is important that companies that enter the NH-ICC embody most of the characteristics described below. Collectively, with careful analysis and a solid “gut”, we will need to convince ourselves that your innovation meets most of these criteria. The more your initial submissions help prove this out, the better.
You or your team:
You should be either:
- One or more tenacious entrepreneurs with relevant success in developing similar technology, starting up new businesses or penetrating similar markets, or
- One or more research scientists with access to a valuable technology or inventions with interest in teaming with tenacious entrepreneurs to build a significant company.
It’s OK if you meet both criteria, but remember that building a significant company requires a team. As the company grows, individuals covering multiple responsibilities will need to split the workload with others.
Your team size and current cash burn rate should be small. We will work with you to find ways to leverage NH-ICC and UNH resources to keep your cash burn rate low until margin on revenues starts to cover your growth costs. You should be open to having direct NH-ICC staff involvement in marketing, finance, sales channel development and operations activities.
Your product or service:
You should have an exciting, unique product or service that meets important market needs, potentially obsolescing existing alternatives. Your innovation should have wide geographical appeal.
Currently, we are focused on innovation areas where the staff can make the biggest difference. These areas include cloud computing, SaaS, software, telecommunication, internet, mobile and related technologies.
Your market opportunity:
There should be a growing total addressable market that will reach over $200M in the next few years. You should have the basis for creating a compelling, well-articulated strategy for capturing and defending a significant market share that will take the company’s revenue to $5+M in three years or less.
Your competition:
You should have an understanding of the competitive landscape. Your product or service positioning and value propositions should demonstrate a sustainable competitive advantage. Competition can be good (they help grow markets). Losing to competitors is bad (you must grow faster than the pack).
Your financial plan:
Whatever you have will prove to be wrong. Whatever we come up with together will also be wrong. We will work with you to develop as accurate a plan as reasonably possible. In all cases, this will be done before acceptance into the program and before referral to our equity funding partners. It is helpful if you have already developed a set of reasonable assumptions to build your plan on. If you have built a good spread sheet model to work from, that is also helpful. At the end of the day, a solid financial plan is the basis for a strong business plan.
Your capital needs:
You should believe that $100K-$2M in private equity financing will allow you to create a sustainable business. You should expect that equity financing will purchase 10-30% of your company. You should have some ideas about how that ownership will turn into financial returns for investors within five years (i.e. merger, IPO, redemption).
You should enjoy roller coasters:
If you enter the NH-ICC program, be prepared for an exciting ride!