It is very typical to measure mature of startups ecosystems in terms of new startups, growing startups, investors, investments, exits, etc. and it makes sense as cities use these statistics in the best possible way to communicate their economic growth at high level and to attract other relevant people, investors, big companies, more entrepreneurs and other stakeholders.

These indicators are however the result of many smaller activities present in a startup ecosystem that contribute to these higher level results - as any startup ecosystem is the sum of multiple variables of an unbalanced equation inherent to the interactions of the startup ecosystem itself.

So, as you can figure out, you need much information to talk about matureness of startups ecosystems. But most of all, you need a good understanding and analysis of your startup ecosystem at different levels and mapping it usually is a good starting point to set up new strategies and achieve a better economic development.

But the thing is that properly mapping a startup ecosystem is more than just to create a good map to show who is who in your city or region. It is crucial to work at different levels and in more detail:

1. After mapping out all relevant organizations and services, you should introduce a common language and understanding among all stakeholders to start identifying startups at different stages and how to best support their progress from stage to stage
2. You should then discuss everything around this and further identify any organization supporting startups, to which stage it caters for, in order to avoid replicated entities, focusing on better allocation of resources or to identify bottlenecks or gaps in services at some stages
3. Implement rights and detailed metrics to measure your startup ecosystem performance as a whole, but more importantly at all services at all stages to better understand what activities best contribute to these overall results. ie. what to measure and what is the sub target being aimed
4. To define how to best work collaboratively and connect services from one organization to another between all parties and how the information about startups, people and data is flowing on real time between core services
5. Understand the current return of investments to innovation in for of impact and value creation 
   
6. How the services are being funded and how sustainable is your startup ecosystem in terms of overall and in most crucial operations
   
7. Open data to show what’s happening in your area as the best marketing campaign to attract people, talent, investments, etc. and to benchmark your activities with other comparable cities and their startup ecosystem 

We truly believe everyone should work on this model, as it makes the investments to growth and innovation truly visible and measurable - as only the things that can be measured can be improved. And the faster the feedback loop, the faster things can be improved.

Actually we are working with this model with few key cities like Helsinki at ecosystem level and even more broadly with independent organizations and we are clearly seeing that it is possible to build a vibrant startup ecosystem in a city in three to five years, what is half or less, compared to known average. 

Future entrepreneurs and current startups deserve this new scenario that we at Startup Commons are creating and we encourage others to contribute and develop innovation, better, faster and with less resources.

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The framework is based on the startup development phases and aims to remove the highest universal risks on the startup journey.

This is the golden age of design, and startups as well as established corporate giants need to excel in the user experience to succeed in the 21st century. Bangalore recently hosted a superb masterclass and conference on user experience, UX 2014, organised by Peepal Design and the global UX Alliance. 

Experts from the US, Ireland, India, South Africa, Brazil, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, France, Canada, Poland and Italy addressed over 300 delegates at the event. Here are my Top 15 takeaways from 15 of the experts who presented at UX 2014. 

1. Align UX with business metrics 

2. Mobile is the centrepiece 

3. Include UX approaches in project management certification 

4. Address current needs but also anticipate future needs 

5. Use visualisation techniques to map UX impacts 

6. Target the UX message to a broader audience 

7. Focus on business goals and not just digital content 

8. UX helps you stay competitive 

9. Embed UX in transactional activities 

10. UX applies to digital and non-digital domains 

11. Test, learn, test, learn 

12. UX is about relationships 

13. Localise, localise, localise 

14. Blend art and science in UX 

15. Tackle the RX to bring UX into rural India 

In sum, the conference and masterclasses delivered a wealth of learnings to the attendees, even making it difficult for them to choose between the three parallel tracks! 

The conference threw up a fascinating range of questions which can be addressed through research publications and at future such events. How can resource-strapped startups not lose out on the UX edge? What approaches work best in dealing with the ‘politics’ of UX in an organisation, when not all stakeholders sees eye to eye on the solution? What term works best to describe UX when users are no longer just users but co-creators of products and services?

Read the whole article in yourstory.com