5. What Does Your Tech Hub Want to Achieve? Your Business Model as the Foundation for Business Analytics

Many different tech hub models are possible but a clear focus on your goals is necessary to set up a useful business analytics approach. Tech hubs can fulfill various functions with various implementation models. They can be profit-oriented or not, and their services can range all the way from hosting an informal meeting with a handful of students to intensive multi-year, hands-on incubation programs. While diverse services can complement each other and experimentation is vital, it is not possible to measure potential effects that tech hub services might have. Instead, it is important to know why you are running your tech hub in a certain way, and what your goals are. Having a very clear answer to this question will help identify a small set of metrics that are relevant indicators of the effects that your tech hub has.

Once you have a clear goal, business model design is useful to understand how to align your services, financial sustainability, and requirements of the innovation ecosystem. You can understand business modeling as a structured way of thinking through your value proposition and how to improve and monetize it. Your business model value proposition also links your service offering and operational model to your overarching goal and vision for your hub. The value proposition is the benefit that achieving your goal generates for your clients. So it is essential for you to understand how each activity that you implement (with different partners, delivery channels, resources, etc.) contributes to increasing your value proposition for your customer segments. Only when you have thought through this effect chain will you be able to identify the most useful indicators for your business analytics approach. If you are unfamiliar with business model design for tech hubs, several infoDev resources can give you further information and guidance (see box 6).

Box 6: infoDev resources for tech hub business model design
The infoDev Digital Entrepreneurship Program has published several resources to help tech hub managers and designers identify viable business models in the innovation ecosystems of developing countries:
1. The Business Model Toolkit provides tools to develop and test a business model for an mLab or mHub, which can be adapted for other tech hubs.
2. The Business Model Evaluation report includes in-depth case studies of business models of four mLabs and three mHubs across five countries, as well as rich contextual and conceptual information.
3. The Holistic Outcomes Assessment of mLabs report takes a closer look at the effects that three of infoDev's four mLabs have had, including their indirect and systemic effects on innovation ecosystems.

In infoDev's experience, tech hubs like mLabs and mHubs have three approaches to achieve their goals:

Box 7: Three business model approaches to support mobile application enterprises

Innovation ecosystems in developing countries often have gaps beyond the lack of support for start- ups. For instance, innovator and entrepreneur communities could be fragmented, or the local talent base might be too small to develop compelling technological solutions. As a result, infoDev found that ecosystem building and skill development can be useful for longer-term and systemic improvement of the conditions for mobile app start-up entrepreneurs. The three different approaches can be connected back to groups of services that mLabs and mHubs can offer.

Start-up Creation: mentoring, seed funding, focused networking (including with investors), acceleration-type start-up competitions, deal brokerage, marketing support, office space, business support.

Skill Development: technical and business training, workshops, app testing facilities, prototyping events and hackathons, coaching, virtual learning.

Network Building: informal networking events, multi-stakeholder conferences, virtual community building, team-building and ideation competitions (hackathons, start-up weekends, barcamps).

Ultimate goal: Support growth-oriented mobile entrepreneurship.

How? Three different but complementary approaches

1. Start-up Creators

Start and develop new growth- oriented start-ups.

2. Skill Developers

Broaden entrepreneurial and technical talent pool and train competent potential start-up founders and employees.

3. Network Builders

Bring together diverse

stakeholder groups and help

activate and organize communities.

Which services? Business models typically focus on different services

Informal networking events and gatherings

Multi-stakeholder conferences, often including small-scale innovation competitions (example, start-up weekends, barcamps)

Blogging, newsletters, and mailing lists.

Technical and business trainings, workshops, and clinics

Virtual learning courses and platforms

Mobile app testing facilities.

Regular, in-depth, one-on-one start-up mentorship and coaching

Core business support (accounting, financial management, legal services, etc.)

Business development: brokerage and mediation of formal contracts, grants, and partnerships.

Questions to ask yourself:

Which approach is the best fit for you and your innovation ecosystem? All of them, one, none? If you have limitations in one of the areas, are there other partners that you can engage to help?

If you are well suited to deliver all three, what resources will you need to effectively implement, monitor, and report?


start-up creation, skill development, and network building. Every business model is different, but there are categories of tech hub business models that can help narrow down your business analytics. For instance, it will help determine metrics if you are clear about what you are interested in: sowing the seeds of entrepreneurship at the foundations of the ecosystem, or work with start-ups and help them become regional and global leaders. infoDev has identified three different approaches that support growth- oriented mobile entrepreneurship but tackle gaps in ecosystems in distinct ways: Start-up Generators have start-up creation and development as their direct goal; Skill Developers focus on broadening the entrepreneurial and technical talent pool and train competent potential start-up founders and employees; and Network Builders bring together diverse stakeholder groups and help activate and organize communities (see box 7 for examples of services that these three approaches typically entail).

These three approaches are not mutually exclusive, but if you know which approach you want to take, you will have a better idea which business analytics to use. Clearly, Skill Development, Network Building, and direct Start-up Creation are all important for mobile app enterprises to emerge and thrive. It is definitely advantageous to pursue all three at the same time, and there could be important complementarities and synergies. Some services, like innovation competitions, may play a role in all three approaches. However, to develop a viable and compelling business analytics approach, it is important to know in which direction you want to go and which identity you want to have.

For example, there could be synergies, but there also could be tradeoffs and tensions between different services, as all tech hubs have limited resources. Business analytics are important in this context because, if your targets for example revolve around Start-up Creation, you could abandon informal networking events when push comes to shove. But if your goal is community building within a Network Building mindset, and if your tracking and targets relfect this mission, you could neglect services for Start-up Creation such as hands-on mentoring and seed financing. In other words, business analytics are determined by your goals and clear vision, but over time they also affect the services you implement and the tradeoff decisions you make. Setting the right course and being aware of differences between approaches is therefore important before you start to design specific indicators or performance- measurement systems.