Ecosystem Mapping Application

This blog post describes a digital ecosystem application concept that has been validated with different startup ecosystems from all over the world. Written by the Startup Commons Team.

What are we improving and why?

​A startup ecosystem is formed by entrepreneurial talent, business creators and businesses at various development phases, combined with various types of public, private and NGO support provider organizations typically in a city/region, interacting as an organic system to create new businesses and innovative companies. Different support providers focus on different parts of the ecosystem, business vertical and/or businesses at their specific development phases.

Ecosystem builders are people and organisations building and facilitating an infrastructure of support services, knowledge and resources for entrepreneurs in their ecosystems. And this key task can be only as effective as the ability of ecosystem builders to understand at ecosystem level what is going on, what is missing, how it is performing and how to organise, document, coordinate, share and distribute the available resources to help everyone navigate the ecosystem.

Additionally, startup ecosystems are fast, dynamic environments with many moving parts. There are new people, changing roles, projects, activities, events, as well as communities meeting and interacting every single week, so any manually collected information becomes quickly outdated. As such, any ecosystem’s manual mapping exercise can only be as complete as the available allocated time, resources and access to information for mapping each ecosystem, and it is also directly related to the constraints of the existing budget to carry out such effort. Due to the associated costs and efforts required, no individuals, institutions or corporations should need to repeatedly undergo such an expensive and time-consuming process.

How are we going to achieve our goal?

​Startup Commons Team is developing an ecosystem mapping application on top of startup development phases framework to visually map and manage your ecosystem services and organisations. Manage full-service information with sharing and collaboration. The main purpose is to maintain and cater comprehensive and dynamic information about the available services with good search and filtering functions, as well as to be able to identify caps in available services for ongoing ecosystem development.

Some key features are:

• Visual interface
• Easy to use
• Strategic tool. It gives direction and ability to adjust
• Up-to-date information
• The right type of information
• Easy to read

What are we creating at the end/along the way?

​As an ecosystem builder, they will have the ability to maintain a general sense of the types of key actor segments and organizations, their position in the ecosystem and regards to Business Creation and startup development, along with understanding their main function in the ecosystem context. At the same time the ecosystem is in constant change, where entirely new organizations & services emerge and others are ended. 

It is highly valuable to develop the ecosystem mapping in such a manner where a distributed data approach for the future is considered along the way. This included a considered design for how to start automating the mapping of ecosystem programmes and services and start standardising ecosystem information (data) collection. This would allow to repeat the process more cost-effectively in greater detail as needed and continue towards being able to get close to a real-time situational understanding of the startup ecosystem without the need for periodical, time-consuming, non-scalable, project-based approaches.  Due to data standardisation, API interfaces and algorithms, making the ecosystem mapping application ecosystemOS compliant, ecosystem mapping process can be done in minutes.This leap forward in ecosystem dynamics evaluation allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of the connected ecosystem every single day.

How do we measure our progress/outcomes?

​In this initial phase we are specifically looking at the conversation rate of the number of pilots planned vs executed

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