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W W W. M A I N E B I Z . B I Z 35 S E P T E M B E R 7 , 2 0 1 5 trick with e Hatchery is that some students come in with many business courses, and others don't. So you need material that's robust enough to bring people up from diff erent levels." While the success of most incuba- tors and accelerators is measured by the number of businesses launched, Friedlander has three measures of success. e launch of the intended business, of course, is one. But a stu- dent might also travel down that path and fi nd it branches into an alterna- tive endeavor. Or, she might abandon the idea all together. But in all three cases, students come away with skills that can be universally applied in future endeavors. Lilyanna Sollberger is a case in point. Currently in San Francisco for an internship with an alternative bev- erage company, she graduated this past spring from e Hatchery, where she developed recipes and marketing ideas for "jun," a type of fermented tea. "A lot of e Hatchery is putting into practice your ideas and testing them to see if they will work in the real world," says Sollberger. "For me, the rapid prototypes involved creat- ing a line of six fl avors, designing the labels and testing them through a series of blind tastings." Although that particular project is on hold now, Sollberger found it useful to immerse herself in the business world. "Even if you decide not to go ahead with the venture, you'll still have completed an amazing term of learning about business, which you can use to develop any venture," she says. "It's a model of how to approach entrepreneurship." Friedlander estimates roughly one venture per year continues as an entity beyond e Hatchery, although not necessarily in the same form. ese include ventures started by Jordan Motzkin and Nick Harris. Motzkin, as part of e Hatchery's inaugu- ral group, started a venture he called Big Box Farms, which received seed funding through the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture to grow produce inside industrial warehouses located near food distribution facilities, allowing the company to bring sustainable local agriculture to densely populated areas. Ultimately, says Friedlander, Motzkin took what he learned about the art of pitching Big Box Farms and started a new company called PitchWorks, today based in New York City and working with fi rms to develop pitch decks. In 2010, Nick Harris and other stu- dents began exploring the conversion through fermentation of food waste into butanol as a gasoline alterna- tive. ey formed Gourmet Butanol LLC and won $30,000 in grants from NASA's Maine Space Grant Consortium, the Libra Future Fund, the Environmental Protection Agency P3 program and the University of Southern Maine, along with seed money from e Hatchery. As an assistant instructor at Colorado Mountain College, Harris went on to design and aid in the construction of a bio-butanol facil- ity, coordinated the installation of a pilot-scale butanol facility and helped develop an educational bio- fuel program. He is now studying for his Ph.D in microbiology at the University of California in Berkeley. "Butanol is just as good as gasoline, but burns cleaner and moves your car further down the road per gallon," says Harris. "But it's very diffi cult to make. You make it using fermenta- tion using a species of bacteria that's fi nicky and can't grow in oxygen." Currently, he says, the Colorado group is exploring the production of ethanol. Harris isn't certain where his studies will take him, although he'll continue in the fi eld of fermentation, his great passion. He views his experi- ence with e Hatchery, and COA in general, as an excellent foundation for understanding how to realize an idea. " e entire business program at COA taught me to be innovative," Harris says. "It taught me to ques- tion why the world is the way it is and to try to fi gure out ways to make improvements." Other Hatchery projects over the years are hugely diverse. Just a few include an initiative to develop a U.S. market for custom-embroidered work from Afghanistan, a community solar project, a program to provide families in MDI's food assistance programs with local, organic vegetables and a student furniture-maker's develop- ment of relationships with weavers and wood harvesters in Mexico. Each project stems from student interest. "When students are doing things they're passionate about, they work even harder," says Friedlander. " is gives them real-world experience. ere's much more learning involved than you could get just by reading a book. e books are important, but being informed and also taking action is an incredible combination." 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