The business incubator P-PINK is renovating a town house in Jana Palacha Street in Pardubice and will move there in the spring. The cost will exceed CZK 30 million, according to Robin Langer, manager of the incubator.
“We will offer entrepreneurs our own offices, our own space, now we have coworking, shared offices. We will focus more on providing consultations, we are expanding our team,” Langer said.
There will be 14 stand-alone offices and 14 shared offices. Construction work on the house, numbered 363 and 372, began last March and will end after a year. There will be an approval in April and then the move-in will begin. From late spring, the institution would be able to operate at the new address. The construction work was accompanied by difficulties, but the completion date was not jeopardised.
“The internal work is currently underway. It is already more positive. At first there were structural deficiencies. There was a strong storm in May. We had the roof taken off at that time, the wind leaned on the gable and knocked it down. Fortunately nobody was there, there was property damage, fortunately it’s behind us now,” Langer said.
The incubator is now housed in the House of Technology in Pardubice, which has small premises. The incubator has been preparing a project to move to a bigger one since 2018. The house on Jana Palacha Street belongs to the city. The organisation will pay the costs with subsidies from the city, the region and the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Preparations and grant applications were delayed by the covida pandemic, the tender was repeated because of this.
P-PINK is a subsidiary of the Regional Development Agency of the Pardubice Region. Thanks to the support of the Pardubice Region, the organisation is gradually expanding its activities to other cities, with branches in Česká Třebová, Moravská Třebová and Svitavy.
“We are financed by Pardubice and the Pardubice Region. We pay attention to the whole territory of the region. We try not to overlook entrepreneurs who do not live in the regional town,” Langer said.
According to Langer, crisis periods, such as the covida pandemic, can also be seen as opportunities for change. “There is no ideal time to start a business, it doesn’t matter if there is a crisis or not. For example, we dealt with the transition of brick-and-mortar stores to e-shops, and during the covid a lot of sales went online. We dealt a lot with legal issues of business conditions on the Internet,” Langer said.
It is also a difficult time for businesses because of the rise in energy prices and costs. “Quite frankly, there’s nothing to solve, costs are just going to go up. Any advice there can seem like princely advice. Rather, we are trying to suggest that entrepreneurs should focus on optimising processes, focus on pricing to keep the production chain going. Unfortunately, it may be that this will lead to a reduction in margins. They are fighting between two evils, whether to close or to have lower earnings,” Langer said.
Source: P-PINK and CTK
