​Startup Commons, along with Swiss EP and US AID, continues supporting Startup Macedonia to help build its position as an ecosystem operator to orchestrate, moderate, coordinate and manage information and communication for Macedonia ecosystem.

Following the initial mission in January, the following mission was carried out in May to build consensus and common alignment with the main ecosystem players within Macedonia ecosystem, whose level of understanding and awareness have increased on this tour around the need of setting up an ecosystem operator for Macedonia ecosystem. Additionally, the value of digitalizing the ecosystem is becoming more and more relevant and many ecosystem actors in Macedonia are discovering the value of data to improve their own operations as well as the whole ecosystem performance. This has been the trigger to start working on designing a piloting project aimed to make ecosystem data visible and enable the data to start flowing among the different ecosystem actors.

Macedonia is taking the lead in the Balkans when it comes to implementing a data-driven approach at ecosystem level for data-driven policy making, measuring service performance, defining funding decisions, enabling matchmaking, etc., but Serbia has already started to move towards the direction too.

Why Growth Academy
Most of business education if focused on educating people for being a good resource at some specific functions in an organization or at managing an existing organization, but not for creating organizations.

Also most entrepreneurship education is educating about creating a known business model to a know market, where innovation based entrepreneurship (ie startups) are about creating unknown business to unknown market AND building organization along the way.

Availability of entrepreneurship education
First off, we can start by the observation that actually there are very limited availability of proper entrepreneurship education available globally. Especially for innovation driven entrepreneurship and especially compared to how valuable innovation driven entrepreneurship is for the societies and economies everywhere.

In simple terms we can say most of education is targeting to train resources to various existing organizations needs, while innovation driven entrepreneurship is aimed to create new value contributing organizations. 

Timing and relevance
Having covered the availability of existing education, where even most of this existing education is only available in higher education levels and mostly consumed at rather young age, being available to those who can afford it or those who qualify for the entry criterias. Considering the value of such education to societies at large, this should be much more inclusive.

At the same time, statistically most successful business founders are people in their forties and in many ecosystems on average there is a higher percentage of innovative entrepreneurs among first and second generation immigrants, including Silicon Valley. Also in practise big part of education/knowledge needed to build an innovation driven business and organization, needs to be available and learned at the time when actually building it. So that things learned can be used right when needed. Learning for later, is only partially beneficial compared to learning it, when really needing it.

While there are tons of materials and knowledge freely available online, about creating and growing a startup, most new and potential future entrepreneurs, startups and other people new to startup ecosystems, don’t know how and where to start, what they should focus on, when to do what, and how to identify what’s relevant now and next. 

So they don’t know what available knowledge online is relevant, and how all these things connect with local support, trainings and services available in their ecosystems.

Also even among most of the people in ecosystem supporting entrepreneurs, have only partial understanding and limited experience on how to actually build a successful startup from nothing, due naturally it is hard to accumulate such knowledge and experience and it also takes long time, being also dependent on various sources to refer to when guiding others along the way.

But even with very well established and know methodologies like lean startup, that only cover small part of all the various things that innovation driven entrepreneurs need to solve while building their business and organization. And there are also a whole question before lean startup phase on how to select the idea to start validating.

There are many other similar things related to building and scaling businesses that as such, can be considered as “right advice” to share for new entrepreneurs. But because there is also the question of “when specific advice is relevant” - “A right advice at the wrong time, is wrong advice.”

​It’s not only about entrepreneurs, trainers and mentors
Beyond the educators, trainers, mentors and business advisors that are directly supporting and training new entrepreneurs, also managers in support organizations and those organizations funding support and educational activities, need to have a better way to identify, be aware and make decisions regards to what is actually educated and trained with their resources.

This is a reason why more holistic framework of key activities is needed. A framework that also help balance the focus between building a business and building an organization. 

It is necessary for the whole startup ecosystem to work on common language and framework to describe, track, measure and guide entrepreneurship and innovation from an “Ideas to Products and into Growing Businesses” and from “Talent to Teams and to effective Organization” in balanced manner.

It also needs to be an “open framework”, that can be developed and adapted by all the parties that are utilizing it in their operations, in a coordinated way. Where if there is sound reasoning and common agreement with actual data indicating that something needs to be changed, it can be changed. This is only possible when there is “a known common thing” in use, to actually make changes to. And also to measure later that changes actually made it better.

​Growth Academy curriculum 
Growth Academy together with broader startup ecosystem development framework, is designed to tackle these issues above. A curriculum build from a globally neutral perspective, as a common language and structure, how various existing leading global knowledge, methodologies etc. link to each others in a logical manner, filling gaps between this existing knowledge and by providing sound reasoning for all topics covered within the curriculum. 

Growth Academy aims to minimize “reinventing the wheel”, by leveraging all the key knowledge captured by multiple serial entrepreneurs, mentors and advisors over the years, as well as best methodologies developed to various parts of building a successful innovative business and effective organization from nothing to success. 

Where key focus is in putting all these pieces in right order, divide them into clear modules based on phases of business and organization development and provide various levels of detail on each these development paths, to cater for different levels needed depending on the needs and roles of the audience in question. Ie. new entrepreneur just starting, team member looking to join a venture, policy maker, advisor of specific phase in the overall journey etc.

Scaling entrepreneurship education by leveraging benefits of online and offline
In addition to tackling these various issues, by having and making such education available to help create a known common language for potential, new and existing entrepreneurs and amongst all ecosystem actors, - it is also key to make it available in multiple ways and also connect it logically with all support and services available in local ecosystem.

Our Canadian partner Startup Continuum is specifically working on eLearning platform and application in ways that leverage digital learning scalability, reach and 24/7 availability benefits, combined with building strong connections to offline training, education, mentoring and broader ecosystem services in each ecosystem locally. 

We as Startup Commons are just starting a webinar based series to deliver entire Growth Academy curriculum online and will combine this with training of trainers program, to open the curriculum to motivated trainers anywhere for deeper learning of the Growth Academy curriculum, to become able to train and support all new people entering startup ecosystems about how innovation driven entrepreneurship works and how successful startups are created and scaled up.

All webinars will be also video recorded and build up to permanent learning resource with related materials, templates etc., along with dedicated section for trainers to access all Growth Academy training materials and having online community for support by Startup Commons and their peers. 

This training of trainers program will cater for three levels of actors; 

1. Individual coaches, who want to become certified as Growth Academy coaches to educate others, 
2. Organizations looking to become certified of having trained coaches available, becoming known to provide Growth Academy based education, training, mentoring etc. 
3. And Operators, who can take a bigger role in local ecosystems to promote, organize and certify local organizations and coaches for Growth Academy, as well as take a role in coordinating the development needs of this program and related tools and materials.

Key element tol collaborations in all levels, including eLearning programs and platform is the startup development phases based "open framework" that Growth Academy curriculum is based on. 

The growth and success of any ecosystem is dependent of constant flow of new people entering the ecosystems, navigating it successfully and effectively utilizing what is available and/or contributing to what is needed the most.

Building common language and framework to be utilized and developed together is the best way to reduce waste in resource use, lower risks and reduce randomness, to accelerate all aspects within ecosystems.

Once eLearning platform is in use, it will be capturing data from various aspects of use (learning in general, problem topics, where learning stopped and why, what are most requested offline support needs etc.). 

Recently it was reported that Business Plan Tool in Helsinki was hacked and some persons in social media raised a question about the role of Startup Commons in the matter. The solution was not implemented or hosted by Startup Commons or any other company in its group. Startup Commons licenses its concepts and models for several parties where licensees are responsible to make implementations and provide the service.

It is not our role to comment on the actual case on behalf of other parties, but we feel it is important to highlight, what Startup Commons is doing, what is Startup Commons’ business model and position in the context.

Startup Commons mission is to scale entrepreneurship and innovation by empowering ecosystem development with global knowledge and tools for data-driven development. Our strategy is to facilitate, develop, distribute and license global knowledge, tools, digital solutions and help to enable data flow for and between Ecosystem Operators.

Startup Commons licenses its assets, including development frameworks, concepts, software, documentation, metrics, branding and provide consulting and advisory services related to these assets to startup ecosystem development. 

In addition Startup Commons promotes best startup support related practices, applications and concepts of others and can co-develop existing or new shared assets to be licensed to other startup ecosystems. Licensing is provided based Creative Commons, Open Source or Shared Source licenses. 

Due scalability reasons Startup Commons may choose to operate only limited test and pilot projects and does not take direct responsibility to implement or operate actual live services for a ecosystem.

Regards to Business Plan Tool case in Helsinki, Startup Commons has not implemented or programmed the software version in the question or hasn’t been responsible for hosting the software, managing database or managing the servers running the software in question.

Business plan tool by Startup Commons is based on the same concept written in different programming language and different architecture, and is not the same software. For Startup Commons’ own software versions we have also strict data security requirements and e.g. work to be compatible with GDPR.

The use of “Startup Commons Finland” -name has been a part of license arrangements, not Startup Commons Business Plan software. Also all licensing agreements related to use Startup Commons name and assets in Helsinki, ended on 2nd of October 2017. 

We believe that a globally effective and sustainable approach is a hybrid model of shared resources with dedicated local operator with responsibility to operate core services and coordinate connected services, where in digital services, data is always owned and controlled by rightful owners in distributed architecture, where ecosystem operators role is only to provide connectivity between services and to enable managing of data.

The incident in Finland is very unfortunate. It together with other recent significant data issues in social media and analytics services highlights the importance of data protection and need to have new models to better guarantee good data protection and privacy. We always emphasize importance of these aspects to our clients and partners. 

iEER is an Interreg Europe funded flagship project with a budget of 2,3 MEUR bringing together 10 regions around Europe with varying ecosystem profiles and maturity levels. Initiated by a group of regions conferred with the European Entrepreneurial Region Award, in past two years and involving more than 600 ecosystem key actors in these regions, iEER have been defining smart paths and solutions to boost regional entrepreneurship ecosystems which supporting new and early stage entrepreneurs.

Since last year, Startup Commons have taken active part in iEER ecosystem peer reviews, learning camps and among other things, contributed startup ecosystem development framework for mapping and highlight the importance of active and ongoing KPI measurement activities, as well as taken active part in helping to designing more standardised transferability model for sharing ecosystem best practices. 

For 2018-2020, iEER project moves to next phase, where based on the collected best practises and other collective learnings from over past two years and beyond, - next, regional action plans are put into practice and their progress is closely monitored.

On 22-23 March 2018 iEER held a Conference in Brussels where, Valto Loikkanen, Startup Commons co-founder and senior advisor, was invited to give a forward looking keynote speech that looks beyond iEER best practises, to also share about the biggest global findings and learnings from Startup Commons global ecosystem development projects. 

The conference was opened by Mr Markku Markkula, 1st Vice President of the European Committee of the Regions, and Ms Christine Chang, Coordinator of iEER Interreg Europe, Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, Finland. The second day of the conference was opened by Mr. Jyrki Katainen, Vice President of European Commission, Commissioner for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness.

This two-day conference was great opportunity to meet with all peers actively participating in the iEER project as well as to share and learn from the work done so far and the main conclusions from the different regions participating in the project. 

Valto Loikkanen made a presentation called “Ecosystem Orchestration and Digital: Entrepreneurial perspective - Support for Startups & Scaleups” in which he shared with the audience the biggest challenges and as such also the biggest impact opportunities for the future, to scale entrepreneurship and innovation in any ecosystem.

Download full presentation.

The presentation was aimed to act as inspiration for iEER regions as they are moving towards its second phase where regional action plans are defined and will be implemented.

The presentation was well received with positive feedback and following the panel discussion, stakeholders wholeheartedly agreed that ecosystem development would benefit from having a sustainable and neutral “ecosystem operator” to help orchestrate ecosystem development and information distribution with systematic and long term approach. As well as following the recent global events related to data privacy also more local and national level focus on leveraging digital solutions in ways that are aligned with digital world developments, EU digital single market initiatives and aligned with up coming GDPR regulation is needed.

As part of the learning process since 2016, during the event iEER released openly shared iEER Handbook, designed by David Kaneswaran from Institute of Technology, Tralee, as a collective work to inspire and support other regions working on developing entrepreneurship, innovation and startup ecosystems related to policies, support functions and new development initiatives within and between regional ecosystem in EU. ​

Four themes which run throughout this report are the key areas of policy intervention in developing entrepreneurship ecosystems in regions:
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• Thematic Focus 1: Entrepreneurial Competence and Mindset Activation
• Thematic Focus 2: Startup and Acceleration support
• Thematic Focus 3: Pathways for Young Entrepreneurs in Outlying Areas
• Thematic Focus 4: RIS3 - Smart Specialisation Implementation for Young Entrepreneurs

The handbook also contains overall findings as a result of the data and peer learnings in 2016-2018 with a list of key local and interregional actions that will be implemented in 2018-2020 to develop regional entrepreneurial ecosystems. 

While the handbook is capturing the core learnings and value of iEER project until it's mid term, it is clear that no single document can capture the vast learnings and perspectives by people whom have taken part have gained during the project so far. We encourage to connect directly with iEER ecosystem developers to tap into their learnings and to seek ways to collaborate. 

Going forward, Startup Commons is looking forward to continue being an active contributor and also help extend the spread of the learnings and value created with iEER project with all ecosystems globally, as well as bring global learnings towards iEER project next phase.

​Related:
See also Startup Ireland report to compare key conclusions from intensive Startup Cathering week in 2015 where over 410 events took place in 22 counties with almost 19,000 participants, a great national collaboration for entrepreneurship. Where Startup Commons collected information from 5 cities, 30 groups in total. On average, each group had 10 people, connecting with 300 participants during the breakout sessions where each group provided 10 key findings for each of the 6 themes that underpin startup ecosystems (Environment, Culture, Skills, Education, Network, State Support), totaling to a database of 300+ inputs that were further summarized, refined, analysed for follow up actions.

​Are you a consultant or an entrepreneur?
- Learn more about Growth Academy Online Training & Certification Programs
Download our startup booklet and watch our videos to learn more about our framework to help startups to grow without "reinventing the wheel" and without wasting lot of time trying to connect the dots.

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

Startup Commons has recently been selected by City of Marbella as the service provider to design a "one-stop-shop" ecosystem portal application to showcase real-time information about ecosystem people, startups, events, support services, development projects and beyond from the digital entrepreneurship ecosystem in Marbella.

Cristóbal Garre, councilor for economic development for City of Marbella, highlighted the importance of “initiating this project as part of Marbella Digital initiative, which is targeting to boost digital entrepreneurship in Marbella. It is very strategic for us to start the inventory of Marbella startup ecosystem as the first step to know the starting point of the ecosystem. Information like what is going on in the startup ecosystem, who is who, who is doing what and why,  where and when are things happening, etc. is very relevant for us in order to start connecting the different ecosystem actors but also to understand over time together with Startup Commons team the services and activities that we are missing in the ecosystem and that we should deploy in order to increase the volume of business creation as well as their quality so that local startups in Marbella can compete in global markets. By knowing that information will help us prioritise the actions and therefore the resources to smartly support entrepreneurs and startups in Marbella”.

The project will kick off by gathering information from existing ecosystem players and users, continuing with its subsequent standardization according to Startup Commons Framework and finishing with the identification of the missing gaps within the ecosystem (services, activities, etc.). The output of this data collection process will be used as part of the designing works that Startup Commons team will carry out to propose a digital solution that help startups get the right services and connections at the right time, and to help public sector decision makers as well as both public and private service providers tailor their services to the specific needs of the startups and other ecosystem actors.

There is mutual interest between City of Marbella and Startup Commons in this project being the solid foundation on which a digital infrastructure is built to enable connectivity and data flow of ecosystem activities and processes in real-time.

​This is originally posted by Startup Commons Team. You are free to re-edit and repost this in your own blog or other use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License terms, by giving credit with a link to www.startupcommons.org and the original post

In a global context where there are tons of materials and knowledge about how to create and grow your startup, startups still do not know where to start, what to focus on, when to do what, and how to identify what’s next. They also do not know how this all connect in sync with support, trainings and services available in a local ecosystem.

It is necessary for startup ecosystems to have a common language and framework to describe, track, measure and guide entrepreneurship and innovation from an “Idea to Product into a Scalable Business” and from “Talent to Team to an effective Organization” to eventually bring efficiency and transparency to help entrepreneurs and startups navigate along the startup journey.

Startup ecosystem development is about breaking ecosystem silos, sharing resources, removing inefficiencies and bringing connectivity and standardisation at all levels. When it comes to transferring entrepreneurship and startup knowledge, more transparency, common sense and efficiency is needed on how it is structured, connected and delivered.

For these the reasons we have created our Growth Academy.

We believe that when entrepreneurs and startups are educated with the right knowledge, while working together in an ecosystem - together we will be able to remove or significantly reduce the highest “universal risks” - We will also be able to educate and inform stakeholders about optimal methods and structures for startups that are strong and flexible enough to sustain failures at various levels, while minimizing the possibility of terminal failure. We will provide reasoning and will connect with other sources and data that support the knowledge and views provided.

Startup Commons has been implementing the Growth Academy program in different startup ecosystems at different levels by partnering with local support providers - but our mission is always “scaling entrepreneurship and innovation”.
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Growth Academy eLearning

So we are now working to bring a digital eLearning solution to help scale Startup Commons Growth Academy to reach a global audience, - so that all entrepreneurs in the world can benefit to improve their potential for success.

Startup Commons has entered into partnership with StartupContinuum, a Calgary, Alberta based startup aligned with Startup Commons’ mission. StartupContinuum is a company that is founded by team of successful serial entrepreneurs who have built and exited a successful eLearning company before. StartupContinuum is creating an innovative online learning environment, with templates and support tools to help startups succeed by fully adapting Startup Commons’ world-renowned framework and curriculum.

The learning platform will be initially rolled out module by module in Calgary, with great support and input from the local Calgary startup community and ecosystem. This ecosystem is actively adopting Startup Commons Framework via key ecosystem players like the Calgary Innovation Coalition (CIC), Alberta Innovates, Calgary Technologies Inc and Rainforest Alberta.

After initial launching, the StartupContinuum / Growth Academy learning platform will actively start expanding to the rest of Alberta and Canada. In parallel, we at Startup Commons will start promoting it to be deployed in Europe and Asia.

Along with publicly announcing this great initiative, we are announcing an open call for all support providers catering support services directly for business creators to invite them to become a key game changer, to deploy and connect Growth Academy in their local ecosystem for a real impact in their local ecosystem.

Are you a Business Creator, Support Provider or Ecosystem Developer? Are you frustrated by the lack of good applications or models to solve your big pain point and cant find a proper solutions?

Share your pain with us, and we will share it with motivated app developers, looking to build applications to problems worth solving and look into ways of co-creating and contributing along the way.

To get creative juices flowing, we are sharing one such concept "open ipr" openly here with the world that have been iteratively developed as part of Startup Commons work with European Commission and several ecosystems, to help solve the problem of unused resources and other IPR not connecting with innovative business creators - leaving more than 90% valuable research findings being under utilized in business creation. ​

​Download PDF below or open via Google Drive for comments and questions.

​Step 2: Identify a customer segment.
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Do you want to build an app for business creators, support providers, or ecosystem developers?

Step 3: Develop empathy for your target customer segment.

Engage in perspective taking to understand target segment needs by asking questions and gaining ground-level experience. We suggest conducting informational interviews and shadowing people in your target customer segment. The goal of this step is to gain an understanding of what matters most to the people in your target customer segment and figure out what challenges they face.

Step 4: Define the problem that you want to solve.

Based on the needs of your target customer segment, create a clear definition of the problem that you want to solve for them.

Step 5: Ideate solutions to the problem.

Sketch and model ideas for how you can solve the problem. There are no bad ideas at this stage. Put every possibility on the table, and defer judgement until the end of the process. Ideating solutions is most effective with a team or group of collaborators. Once you have entertained all possibilities, vote and choose the idea that you would like to pursue.

Step 6: Prototype your solution.

Build a minimum viable product (MVP). This version of the product should allow you to collect the maximum amount of information about customer preferences with the least effort. Hackernoon.com provides an excellent guide to minimum viable products. 

Step 7: Test your application.

Engage in validated learning. Use focus groups and customer feedback to figure out what works and where improvements are needed.  

Step 8: Repeat steps 3-7.

Follow the lean methodology of build-measure-learn-repeat. However, don’t be afraid to submit your application once you reach this step! You can always keep improving it.