​Startup ecosystems are filled with multiple digital and in-person touchpoints to bring help for entrepreneurs and startups. Behind the scenes, removing obstacles and creating a better startup journey experience within the ecosystem, is the ecosystem mapping app and its capacity to be interoperable with other systems.

It’s through interoperability that startup ecosystems will begin to break down their silos, use open standards to harmonize their fragmented and incompatible systems and data sharing, and achieve better outcomes.

Here's seven aspects that make Startup Commons ecosystem mapping app different to other approaches:

The startup ecosystem interoperability space is unique and it is a long term journey that never stops. Ecosystem operators need a stable technological partner to help them navigate the complexity of ecosystem interoperability. This partner should:

• Advise you regarding both digital and domain knowledge aspects for ecosystem development
• Provide professional consultation and support to help you grow ecosystem as well as offering technology advice
• Demonstrate a history of stability

Take a simple first step with Startup Commons and start finding the answers to your ecosystem challenges.

If you are an economic development financier driving innovation and entrepreneurship, one of the crucial aspects is to maximize the impact of the public funding flowing within the ecosystem.

It is assumed that they have a great understanding about the startup journey and that they have accurate data and information to support their decisions towards implementation. The reality is quite different. And we, as entrepreneurs, know that assumption is the mother of all mistakes, in one form or another. Only things that can be understood, can be developed.

Here's a process followed by many ecosystems with different size and maturity levels that helps, among other things, minimize the mismatch in the public funding:
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1.- Understand the startup journey​, from "idea to product, to growing business" and from "talent to team, to real organization" in balanced manner

3.- Understand the service targets that are needed to support startups in their different phases. Services in the ecosystem should focus on:

• ​Support ideation to create new potential innovations in technology, business models, processes etc. and to develop these to actual growing businesses and
• To support the team formation and further development for actual effective organization. Below is a chart of some typical services and to what part of startup development those are most relevant, along with some ecosystem level focus areas in context to these services.

Following the process above can help you separate your assumptions from your decision-making and to implement what is really needed vs what is trendy. This process is what we recommend to use for all decisions related to startup ecosystem development, and it becomes more powerful the more it is adopted among the different ecosystem actors.

And, when things don't turn out how you hoped they would, then you should evaluate how the decision was made. There might be different reasons but lack of data and resources are usually behind them.
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If you have questions about applying the ecosystem framework, want more examples of how it was implemented, or you even want to propose improvements, please reach out: info at startupcommons.org​