It’s difficult to think back this far but, a couple of years ago, when then-Senator Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, one of the ideas he touted to support small businesses and help the economy was a national network of business incubators. Fast forward a year and a half or so, and there hasn’t been much noise out of the Obama Administration about business incubators since the 2008 election. But, just because President Obama has other things on his mind right now doesn’t mean the idea has entirely gone away. Last week, the House Committee on Small Business convened a hearing to look into business incubators specifically in the context of the way in which they can help to spur job creation. And, in spite of Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez’s (D-NY) observation that microbusinesses by themselves created one million jobs in the wake of the 2001 recession, it quickly became clear that the focus on job creation would leave microbusinesses in the shadows during this hearing.

One prominent witness was Dr. Robert Strom of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, who gave members to understand that you need to focus your efforts on the fast growth gazelles if you want to spur job creation. This is not to say that business incubators are useless for microbusinesses. On the contrary, the suite of services they generally offer are just the sorts of assistance that microbusinesses need in order to beat the failure rate numbers. However, if lawmakers are going to be so thoroughly focused on job creation that they will attach incubator funding to programs that service high growth firms, that could be bad news for both microbusinesses and for the thousands of American communities that are better suited to developing a local economy without the gazelles. That said, business incubators are another development resource that certainly deserves more attention and could perhaps be added to the SBA arsenal. At the moment, there is at least some bipartisan support for the idea.