The B-Schools That Connect Students To TIME’s Top Startup Incubators & Accelerators

Want to build a startup while earning your MBA? Look beyond the entrepreneurship courses to the actual founder resources available at your target business schools.  

TIME magazine’s inaugural ranking of America’s 80 Best Incubators and Accelerators, released last week, is a good place to start. Universities are all over the list. Twenty-one of the 80, including five in the top 10, have a clear university connection, whether they are housed directly on campus, operated through a university center or school, or maintain a formal affiliation with one.  

Several have especially strong business school ties, including Chicago Booth’s Polsky Center, Creative Destruction Lab at Washington Foster, and Berkeley SkyDeck, which was co-founded with Berkeley Haas.  

Others, such as Northwestern’s Garage and Harvard Innovation Labs, are university-wide resources that business students can tap alongside engineers, scientists, designers, and other aspiring founders. Still others — like the Stanford-affiliated StartX and MIT-created The Engine — operate independently despite their deep university roots. 

3 UNIVERSITY PROGRAMS IN THE TOP 7 

For would-be founders, TIME’s list highlights programs with access to an innovation infrastructure much bigger than the business school itself. That could mean an MBA founder prototyping alongside an engineering student or helping commercialize technology from a university lab. The best incubators and accelerators often provide access to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, legal help, wet labs, pitch competitions, seed funding, or a technical co-founder.  

Take The Garage at Northwestern University, which landed at No. 5 on TIME’s ranking. Founded in 2015 and located in a campus parking structure, it has supported more than 1,500 startups that have collectively raised more than $1.6 billion and created more than 2,600 jobs. Some 2,000 Northwestern students engage with The Garage each academic year. 

Kellogg MBA students Neha Mehta and Catherine Malloy used The Garage to build Rora, a women’s health startup focused on menopause care and one of Poets&Quants’ Most Disruptive MBA Startups for 2025.  

Mehta and Malloy spent a summer in The Garage’s 10-week accelerator, Jumpstart. In The Garage’s maker space they ran live customer tests, 3D-printed packaging mockups, and iterated on bottle and label designs. Rora won first place at Jumpstart’s Demo Day and another $10,000 in funding. 

The Garage is open to full-time Northwestern students. Offerings range from an entry-level program for students merely curious about entrepreneurship to startup matchmaking to a residency program. VentureCat, its university-wide startup competition, awards a $175,000 prize pool. 

One spot behind The Garage is Harvard Innovation Labs at No. 6, connecting innovators across all 13 academic schools. Since its founding in 2011, it has helped more than 7,000 ventures whose founders have collectively raised more than $15 billion. Its facilities sit between Harvard Business School and Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex in Allston. 

No. 7, University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, applies Booth’s expertise to venture creation and commercialization across the university. Its staff connects entrepreneurs with investors and partners, supports university technologies, and runs the New Venture Challenge, the longtime Booth startup competition whose alumni include Grubhub, Braintree/Venmo, and Simple Mills.  

Last fall, the center launched Booth’s new undergraduate minor for entrepreneurship and innovation. 

HOW UNIVERSITIES BECAME STARTUP FACTORIES 

Incubators may feel like a natural feature of elite research universities where founders get direct access to business professors, computer scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers, lawyers, venture investors, and thousands of ambitious students looking for the next interesting thing to build.  

But it wasn’t always the case. 

The model didn’t really pick up steam until the 1970s when the National Science Foundation began experimenting with ways to move technology and ideas out of university laboratories and into practical use. 

NSF-backed innovation centers at MIT, the University of Oregon, the University of Utah, and Carnegie Mellon became early test cases. MIT emphasized undergraduate coursework and turning ideas into products. Utah focused on an ecosystem around research-driven startups while Carnegie Mellon created a nonprofit “hatchery” to support graduate student ventures. 

CMU was particularly suited to the experiment because it combined strong engineering with a world-class business school, urban planning, industrial design, and an interdisciplinary culture. Its Center for Entrepreneurial Development (now the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship) gave early founders space and seed support while trying to make entrepreneurship education a core function of a modern technology university. 

The university-as-innovation-engine model eventually became embedded across higher education. TIME’s 2026 ranking shows just how thoroughly that model has taken hold. 

FROM ROTMAN TO FOSTER, A B-SCHOOL ACCELERATOR GOES GLOBAL 

The ranking also highlights Creative Destruction Lab,  a startup accelerator with deep roots in business education. Created in 2012 at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, CDL has since spread its model around the world.

MBA students work alongside science- and technology-based startups, helping founders with financial models, market evaluation, and scaling strategies. The network now includes chapters at business schools such as Oxford Saïd, HEC Paris, and at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business whose lab landed at No. 15 on TIME’s ranking. 

CDL-Seattle runs a nine-month program for early-stage science and technology startups and connects them with entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders. While business students may not necessarily be inventing the medical device, quantum technology, or manufacturing process, they can help determine whether anyone will buy it, how much capital it needs, and how to turn a technically impressive idea into a viable company.

SILICON VALLEY’S UNIVERSITY STARTUP ECOSYSTEM 

Further south, in the unicorn factory that is Silicon Valley, universities and business schools are deeply woven into the cross-pollination that fuels the world’s most prolific startup ecosystem. 

Berkeley SkyDeck, ranked No. 24, was created jointly by Berkeley Haas, the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. SkyDeck selects roughly 20 companies for each of two annual cohorts, while giving Haas students opportunities to intern with startups, network with founders and advisers, and potentially find ventures to join. 

Across the Bay, StartX, ranked No. 9, offers mentorship, education, and a startup community for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs. Though it operates as an independent nonprofit, it was founded by Stanford students and partners with the university through the Stanford-StartX Fund. 

NEXT PAGE: TIME’s America’s Best Incubators and Accelerators of 2026

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