We recently added over 300 American business incubators and tenant companies to our investor database. Additionally, we presented some national data trends on incubators. We’ll periodically be turning to individual states to take a deeper look at their incubators and portfolio companies.

Let’s take a look into the robust incubator economy of Ohio. With 339 companies in incubation across 24 different incubators, Ohio more than triples the national average of 110 companies per incubator and nearly triples the national average of 8.3 incubators per state, too. This leads Ohio to have a company to incubator ratio of 14.1, suggesting that incubators are relatively large in the state. However, of the 339 tenant companies, only 105, or roughly 31%%, were considered scalable and thus added to our database. (Note: Our focus at ChubbyBrain is primarily on scalable companies. Thus, consulting, retail, and service companies that may be in these incubators are not included in our database or the remainder of this analysis). Ohio’s scalability ratio of 31% is much lower than the national average of 44%, suggesting that Ohio incubators hold many small service and retail-oriented businesses as well.

Ohio’s largest incubators were the MAGNET Innovation Center and TechColumbus, collectively accounting for nearly 40% of the state’s total scalable companies. MAGNET is a Cleveland-based incubator that focuses on manufacturing, and TechColmbus is an incubator aimed at helping start-ups in the IT, biotech, and advanced material fields to improve the Central Ohio region. Percentages of other Ohio incubators are depicted in Graph A.

Healthcare businesses represented 42% of all scalable incubator companies in Ohio, as shown in Graph B. As Graph C illustrates, businesses in the Medical Devices industry made up half of the companies within the Healthcare sector, followed by Pharmaceutical companies making up 23%. Following the Healthcare sector, the Internet and Industrial sectors were the most popular for incubators, comprising 17% and 18% of scalable incubator companies.

Cleveland contained the 62% of the state’s incubated companies, which is understandable since some of the Ohio’s largest incubators, such as MAGNET, are located there. Details on the city-wide breakdown of Ohio incubator companies are shown below in Graph D.

Largest Incubators

Graph A

Sector Breakdown

Graph B

Top Sector: Broken Down by Industry

Graph C

Geographic Breakdown

Graph D