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​

Ecosystem Mapping App is the first 'Application Module' of EcosystemOS - a digital service for startup ecosystems to aggregate and distribute ecosystem information in a standardized format, with the main goal to help maintain the best and most accurate information for startups, support organizations, governmental entities and other ecosystem stakeholders and to provide ecosystem intelligence help them make quick, secure and efficient decisions.
Watch this five minute demonstration and see how Ecosystem Mapping App helps startup ecosystems to find their gaps with holistic view, standardised information and interoperability.

Starting Q2 this year - As an ecosystem representative, your ecosystem can apply to Join our global alliance membership. This will enable you to start deploying EcosystemOS Mapping App in your local ecosystem(s), to enable data flow within and between ecosystems via globally shared needs within ecosystems.
As a member of the alliance your ecosystem can also be part of contributors and/or governance parties of the global open standards, for innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem builders, operators, architects and developers globally.
Benefits of the alliance
Nobody can develop open standards alone, yet transparent open (non-proprietary) standards are needed to enable true interoperability within and between ecosystems, especially in areas like;

• commonly established terminology with commonly accepted definitions (data is only as good as the definition of the meaning of each data attribute).
• commonly used and transparent key performance indicators (KPIs), for performance measures and benchmarking
• common data strategy for what data is to be collected, stored and how it is to be handled.
• common principles about what data is shared, to whom, for what purposes and on what terms.

It is clear that no ecosystem can develop these alone and it is also clear that interoperability within and between ecosystems can't be effectively achieved without these. At the same time, it's clear that via alliance collaboration, the overall cost and risk of development goes down for all participating members. 
As we are finalizing the work to publish the 2022 Alliance Program details, you can check out the 2021 collaborative ecosystem development project call for more information about the established foundation that the 2022 program is based on.

​Together, cheaper and faster!

Few things are as important as common understanding and definitions. Without knowing exactly what specific terms mean, and how they apply to given situations, little discourse startup or ecosystems development can take place. In developing startups and startup ecosystems, there are still many terms that are misunderstood or misused.

There's no standardised definition of what is a startup. Wherever we work, whoever we ask, entrepreneurs, support organisations, investors, governmental entities, etc. have their own understanding and definition of the startup term, what makes difficult to develop any ecosystem.

Here's a definition based on the startup development phases​ you can use in your local context in case you are still missing it. It was defined with the main goal to make it as complete, global and neutral as possible:

​And then, use that definition combined with the evaluation tool below to assess the potential of any startup in your ecosystem:

Wondering how the whole ecosystem can adopt it and become a standard? Get to know more here

We are launching the year with focus on Ecosystem Mapping App - a central piece of ecosystem interoperability, that brings about new meaning, context, and ecosystem insights through a combination of multiple diverse sources of data.

2022

We’re feeling energized. Over the last year, we’ve implemented some big changes, grown our team and set strong foundations, to complete our transition towards a fully digital company serving innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem builders. With focus on data-driven solutions, we help to bring the answers to the questions that matter for ecosystem development in a more efficient, accurate and scalable way.

Ecosystem Mapping App

The ecosystem mapping activity is at the core of any ecosystem​​ and we are excited to update our global network of ecosystem builders.

Based on the foundation that your primary data, data distribution and defining data sharing rights, should always remain in local hands, controlled by the rightful owners depending on the data in question, from the very beginning to long-term. Ecosystem mapping application is currently available as customised implementation with APIs first - approach, to give you more ownership about the solution, more control of your ecosystem data. 

The more control over the data and digital tools the ecosystem developers and operators have, the better are the quality, accuracy and value of that data is. And so are all are related ecosystem applications, analysis, measurements, forecasting, decisions and planning, utilizing it towards developing, accelerating and growing the ecosystem.

​It’s 2022 and if managing ecosystem data and distribution of it beyond manual efforts is not in your plans for ecosystem development, you have already fallen behind. You’re essentially missing out on the answers that you need to effectively support entrepreneurs, startups and innovation in general and, most importantly, you are wasting your always limited ecosystem development resources and opportunities, around the data that already exists in your ecosystem, but it's simply not utilised properly.

Make managing your ecosystem data a priority for 2022, a year of the Tiger​. We know it may not feel easy, but that's why we are here to help you as a globally neutral actor, looking forward to helping you tackle your challenges one by one, "sitting with you on the same side of the table".

What could you get if your weekly startup ecosystem events were more effective and accurate attracting the right audience?
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Experienced ecosystem builders know: when you attract the right people in the events, you truly enable magic among them. To learn how technology can contribute to make this happen, register to the ecosystemOS protolab webinar​.

What will you get in this webinar?

This webinar is designed to bring our global community of ecosystem builders together and point them toward their next steps on the automation journey for startup ecosystem development. We will cover:

• How to use the startup development phases framework (SDP) in startup ecosystem communications as an easy way to improve the accuracy of communication
• How to apply the startup development phases at scale 
• How to use SDP classifier for automated ‘startup development phases’ -labelling for startup events 
• Future commercial steps

Ready to transform your ecosystem so you have more time to do what matters? Join us at ecosystemOS protolab webinar​ to enable automation and intelligence in your ecosystem to develop and orchestrate it faster and smarter.

Feel free to contact us  (info@startupcommons.org) in advance with your questions/suggestions. Don't miss this session out and book your place!

Inspired by the fantastic work of our colleague Chad Renando about Systems and platforms for mapping and measuring innovation ecosystems: Australian and global examples, we at Startup Commons decided that an additional effort was needed from our side to communicate Startup Commons' digital side offering and our position in the 'industry of supporting ecosystem development'.

In the digital economy, the ownership of data in each city or country, should always remain in local hands, where it should primarily generate value for local economy first. But in practice, ecosystem data is scattered through different actors and systems (local and global). This means that no single organisation by itself has all the data there is on the ecosystem in its possession.

Therefore, to achieve a truly 360-degree view of any ecosystem, collaboration between organizations and interoperability between applications, are keys to success. This is the nature of any ecosystem. To establish an architecture that enables ecosystems to capture and use data to improve entrepreneurs' journeys and related supporting services.
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Learn more about the digital architecture and approach that we focus on developing. Based on an open tech stack for innovation entrepreneurship ecosystems, built on open standards and interoperability at the core.

Startup Commons is expanding the Growth Academy offering beyond our global offering in our own website. We are now making all the Growth Academy eLearning assets fully available for your local distribution, to be integrated in your own digital channels for maximum impact and to give you full freedom and rights for branding and to be localised.

And we’re thinking it’s time to do some proper evolution and have a new color style that provides a qualitative leap while maintaining a touch of neutrality that allows it to be used by multiple organisations regardless of their branding.
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Our designers have created some rough drafts, and we’d like to know which one you like! Please help us out by selecting the color style you like best and letting us know why you like it, or what edits you suggest!