
POCATELLO – COVID-19 put a crimp in the works, but Idaho State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) is on track to open its outreach center when the university does, likely around June 1.
“We were scheduled to open it April 1,” said Jeff Street, professor in business and the director for CEED.
The group started looking for office space about five years ago for a variety of federally funded programs such as the Small Business Development Center, TechHelp and the Eastern Idaho Development Corp., as well as Bengal Solutions, a graduate assistant consultant group, Street said.

CEED is a virtual umbrella organization, operating out of the College of Business, to reach out to the business community, Street said, while the other groups have their own reporting group. But there is synergy between them.
“So we looked to see if we could get some office space off-campus, and possibly incubate small business startups,” he said.
At one point, the organization had an offer of a large building from a Boise company that Street did not name. CEED was by then working with about eight small businesses, as well as one larger one that needed to expand into another location to make a new product.
“We believed we had space in that building for 30 tenants,” he said. “But you never want to fill them all up. You always want to have open space in case a company comes along that needs a quick home, so we were targeting 25 small businesses.”
But that building wasn’t suitable for a number of reasons, particularly the cost of operating and maintaining it, Street said. There were several other opportunities, but they all fell short.
“None of them were the space we were wanting,” he said. “We wanted to be high-visibility and visible to business.”
Then CEED was offered a space on Main Street in the Art Haus space, an artists’ incubator.
“It’s storefront space, just the right size for us to have an office for people to meet and me to hold office hours once a week,” Street said.
Once the outreach center opens, Street is still planning to look for incubator space, but instead of looking for one big building that would house all the small businesses as well as CEED itself, he’s likely to take a different tack.
The office still wants to be able to offer low-cost space to startups for three to five years until they reached the point where they could rent their own space.
“A business incubator strives to just break even,” Street said. “We haven’t been able to find the right landlord to understand that we need free space that allows these companies to come in and incubate.”
Consequently, Street has another model in mind, a decentralized incubator. Instead of having a large building — sort of a mini-mall for startups — the organization is looking for what it calls “back room space” in existing buildings in downtown Pocatello. Examples could include warehouse space that a storefront doesn’t need, or a back entry that could be used by non-retail businesses.
“Small manufacturing businesses or web page businesses could operate out of the back room of some buildings,” he said. “We’re working to identify that space with the Old Town Pocatello office to see if we could connect a startup business with that space. We would still offer our services — we would go to them, or they would come to us, but not in the same building.”
Exactly how many small businesses such spaces could incubate, Street wasn’t sure.
“First of all, we need to identify spaces that are available,” he said. “Hopefully, there’s 8-10 available in town.”
That would allow the organization to incubate seven or eight businesses, he said.