Kauffman Incubator Project

The Kauffman Incubator Project advanced the capacity of researchers and policymakers to measure the characteristics and performance of entrepreneurship ecosystem institutions. To this end, we created a set of tools to automate the identification and classification of ecosystem organizations and the extraction of data on startup firms from their websites. The grant was originally submitted in 2017 at Rice University but was drawn at Georgetown University from 2018 to 2019.

Kauffman Incubator Project
Project Information
Principal Investigator	Ed Egan
Academic Institution	Georgetown University
Grant Cohort	UMM
Duration	2018-2019 Academic Year
Copyright © 2019 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved.

Administration

Goals

Specifically, our goals are to develop a system to:

1. Classify entrepreneurship ecosystem organizations, including high-growth technology incubators, startups, and venture capitalists based on a short textual description;
2. Identify the client listing page on an incubator's website;
3. Automate the extraction of information about startups from an incubator's client listing page;
4. Make this system available to the research community as opensource software.

We are using modern machine learning techniques in our tools, and we expect that the third element will require new computer science.

Expected Outputs

By March 2019

1. Determine at least 4 primary data sources, or secure licenses to extract ‘seed data’ from these sources, as measured by program records.
2. Have a working prototype of an automated classifier to distinguish between incubators and other entities described in seed data, as measured by program records.
3. Collect data in at least 5 ecosystems, as measured by availability of a dataset.
4. Develop a protocol for the tool to extract client company identity information from incubator websites, as measured by program records.

By June 2019

1. Have a working prototype of a tool to identify client company listings from incubator websites, as measured by program records.
2. Upload the collected data to GitHub, Dataverse, or other publicly accessible web platform for use by a set of academics, as measured by program records.
3. Produce a summary on the Open Development Process for the prototype as measured by program materials.

Expected Outcomes

By June 2019

1. At least 3 improvements to the measurement system will be made as a result of collaboration with other researchers, as measured by feedback from collaborators.
2. At least 15 researchers external to the UMM cohort will have contacted the project for additional information and/or collaboration, as measured by correspondence.
3. At least 5 outside users will have used the open source tool, as measured by records of use and postings of the data.
4. There will be at least 50 views of the online documentation of the development process, as measured by web analytics.
5. The data posted on the public forum will have at least 50 views/downloads of the uploaded data, as measured by web analytics.
6. The seed data will have at least a 70% baseline accuracy and coverage of incubators compared to results from hand collected data on 5 ecosystems, as measured by the data analysis.

Fulfillment

Main Project Tree

The list below shows the main project tree with the project assignments.

1. Ecosystem Organization Classifier -- Anne Freeman, Libby Bassini (Active)
   1. Defining Incubators -- Anne Freeman, Libby Bassini (Active)
      1. Formulate baseline attributes -- Anne Freeman (Active)
   2. Incubator Seed Data -- Anne Freeman (Active)
      1. Crunchbase Database -- Hiep Nguyen (Active)
      2. INBIA -- Anne Freeman (Active)
      3. Google Crawler -- Anne Freeman (Active)
      4. AngelList Database -- Anne Freeman (Active)
      5. VentureXpert Database -- Khai Nguyen, Vineet Anne (Active)
         1. vcdb4 -- Ed Egan (Active)
      6. US Incubators -- Yi Ma (Active)
      7. Incubator Seed Data Coverage -- Ed Egan (Active)
   3. Incubators in Five Ecosystems -- (Active)
      1. Ecosystem: Austin or Houston -- Yi Ma (Active)
      2. Ecosystem: Burlington VT -- Nancy Yu (Active)
      3. Ecosystem: Denver CO -- Khai Nguyen (Active)
      4. Ecosystem: Washington DC -- Libby Bassini (Active)
      5. Ecosystem: Twin Cities MN -- Vineet Anne (Active)
      6. Incubator Seed Data Coverage -- Ed Egan (Active)
2. Listing Page Classifier -- Nancy Yu (Active)
3. Listing Page Extractor
   1. Domain Specific Language Research -- Lasya Rajan (Active)
   2. Listing Page Plugin Spec -- Rex Bone (Active)
   3. LP Extractor Protocol -- Lasya Rajan (Active)

List of All Projects

Information on each project under the Kauffman Incubator Project may be found in the table below. All projects are included in Category:Project and use Template:Project. To create or edit a project, please use Form: Project and set the Has sponsor property to Kauffman Incubator Project:

[[Has sponsor::Kauffman Incubator Project]].

Data summary: There are 25 active projects found.

Project	Owner	Subsumes
AngelList Database	Anne Freeman
Crunchbase Database	Hiep Nguyen
DSL Encoding	Hiep Nguyen
DSL generator	Hiep Nguyen
Defining Incubators	Anne Freeman Libby Bassini
Domain Specific Language Research	Lasya Rajan
Ecosystem Organization Classifier	Anne Freeman Libby Bassini	Defining Incubators Incubator Seed Data Incubators in Five Ecosystems
Ecosystem: Austin TX	Yi Ma
Ecosystem: Burlington VT	Nancy Yu
Ecosystem: Denver CO	Khai Nguyen
Ecosystem: Twin Cities MN	Vineet Anne
Ecosystem: Washington DC	Libby Bassini
Incubator Classifier - Concept Diagram	Hiep Nguyen
Incubator Classifier - Formulate baseline attributes	Anne Freeman
Incubator Seed Data	Anne Freeman	Incubator Seed Data Coverage
Incubator Seed Data Coverage	Ed Egan
Incubators in Five Ecosystems		Ecosystem: Denver CO Ecosystem: Washington DC Ecosystem: Burlington VT Ecosystem: Twin Cities MN Ecosystem: Austin TX Incubator Seed Data Coverage
LP Extractor Protocol	Lasya Rajan
Listing Page Classifier	Nancy Yu
Listing Page Extractor		LP Extractor Protocol
Listing Page Plugin Spec	Rex Bone
Open Development Process	Ed Egan
US Incubators	Yi Ma
Vcdb4	Ed Egan
VentureXpert Database	Khai Nguyen Vineet Anne

Researchers may also wish to review related precursor projects done at the McNair Center.