In Australia they have something similar for a few professions(teaching being a big one). Generally it's 1 year in somewhere really undesirable, then 2 more years in ok places then freedom. Though in those cases you're being sponsored by a government organisation that is generally also your employer.

The only way I could see making it work in this case would be if it was specific cities doing the sponsoring and requiring the business to be run out of incubator type offices for X amount of time. So not very well at all.