Since 2013, Startup Commons has been focusing on helping cities, regions and countries put zero barriers in the way of entrepreneurs, innovators and job creators, becoming a strong but neutral partner for strategic execution to empower and enable local and business vertical ecosystems key private & public actors in designing, implementing and operating local ecosystems, contributing to the development of related economies and societies. 

Being no surprise to anyone, the year 2020 has been globally unique due to COVID19, where the effects on the market have been significant in many ways. One of them is that there has been a significant increase in the use of digital services and practices, and the perception of the benefits and new opportunities that come with their use. Essentially because in practice this pandemic showed the vulnerability of local startup ecosystems where a lot of the activities and services are based on the physical networking of people, often through various events, training, etc., which practically ended completely when meetings could no longer be arranged. 

In this new awakening era, there has been a clear recognition around the need to build and develop ecosystems in a different way with similar outcomes through the support of digital. As a result, ecosystem stakeholders (governments, ecosystem builders, support functions, private companies, investors and other stakeholders) are asking for more data, how to access high quality data, its utilisation and automation.

During the second and third quarter of the year, while COVID shock phase was on globally, we decided to make all our eLearning content with ‘Growth Academy’ and 'Ecosystem Development Academy' free for the world. As an immediate action to start contributing towards new business creation and to help bounce back economies via ecosystem development knowledge and tools. 

Towards end of 2020, driven by market changes and acceleration of all digital aspects in the markets, we made a strategic decisions to accelerate our focus from consulting approach to growth via digital solutions approach.

Along with this decision, we decided to reorganize our activities into a new company, Digiole Oy. To further focus on international growth with digital solutions. Digiole enables more clear structure and divide between Startup Commons innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem development activities and more broadly applicable digital solutions development under different brands and activities;

• where activities under Startup Commons brand are more focused on local and geographically focused ecosystem development needs, often driven by public sector and non profit activities in the early part of the startup journeys,
• and where activities under Digiole brand we can more clearly focus on digital services development, focus on globally crossing business vertical ecosystem development. Also development of digital platform economy, platforms & digital ecosystems, will start as a new products & services category under Digiole, where international private companies emerge as a new customer segment.

This will further enable us to also better support all of our open source services and offerings and also gives room for future shareholders, and investors to join us going forward.

We all need a little bit of help to leave 2020 behind and look ahead and start 2021 with energy, motivated and excited. In the context of innovation entrepreneurship, especially for those that have the big responsibilities to create the conditions to generate more jobs, more innovative businesses and therefore more economic growth. We can’t do ecosystem development alone. We can’t do it with a silo thinking while the field just keeps developing too slow. It’s time to do things with a different approach, based on a better understanding of the ecosystem and designing things with ecosystem actors, for scale, for sustainability, for reusing and with an open approach to help to enable and increase true collaboration.

Because of this, we have now designed a first privately led, global "collaborative ecosystem development project” that is part of a bigger and longer journey towards ecosystem digitalisation​ but starting as simple as possible by collaboratively developing and deploying an ecosystem mapping application as a shared project, after proper validation for years with many ecosystem builders and related actors all around the world, who see in this application one of the key modules to improve ecosystems performance.

​The core idea is that we have planned and calculated the direct and realistic costs of the project, and then, the more ecosystems will join, the cheaper it will get per each ecosystem. While at the same time, all participating ecosystems get the full outcomes and benefit from collaborative learning, while also being able to adjust/localise key aspects from local perspective as needed.

​We are looking at initiating this with a batch of 2-10 qualified ecosystems in Q1 2021 and we would love to see your ecosystem joining in this new journey with Startup Commons and really leading digital transformation and standard development for ecosystem development together with other ecosystems globally. 

​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.

​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

​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.

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

​This blog post describes an ecosystemOS data pipe development that has been validated with different startup ecosystems coming from Europe, North America and Asia. Written by the Startup Commons Team.

​Startup events are at the heart of any ecosystem but often times the view of an ecosystem event schedule looks like as follows:

​This picture is quite usual in many ecosystems due to lack of visible startup events data to be shared that helps bring more coordination and collaboration among ecosystem actors. It really doesn’t help to schedule multiple events at the same time and  target a similar audience. 

It would bring more efficiency if we could put all of the tech & business events data out there into a single platform so that events data can be accessed globally by different users and along with that it can also be transferred to other websites, blogs, online communities on user demand.

​Startup Commons Team is working towards Aggregating and Redistributing Startup Events Data globally and automatically. We will create  a standardized data model (GraphQL Schema) for structuring data on Startup Commons side and making that data available via GraphQL API endpoint. Some of the attributes we are collecting are Event name, Event Organisation, ID, category, Date, time, timezone, description, format or  website link.

​Initially, to get more startup events data visible, identify key attributes of startups events and an integrated API service to enable data transfer within and between ecosystems.

From Startup Commons point of view, we are looking at the quality of the startup events data model and the API performance. Regarding the data model, these are the main factors to consider:

• Clarity - attributes and information are clearly defined
• Accuracy - Information is true and correct
• Completeness - information is understandable
• Conciseness - same information is repeated
• Consistency - one piece of information doesn’t contradict another

Additionally, we could get static data from the model itself, data from usage of the data model, data from the comparison with similar data model.

From API perspective, these are some of the KPIs we are looking at tracking:

• Locations 
• Calls Made 
• Best Quality APIs 
• Fastest APIs
• Best Cloud (latency) 
• Cloud Services 
• APIs Tracked 
• Worst Quality APIs 
• Slowest APIs 
• Worst Cloud

In our tireless pursue to 'push the envelope' towards enabling ecosystem level digital connectivity, we have the opportunity to work with amazing new technologies like GraphQL, to unlock new flexibility than their predecessors like Restful API's.

Sometimes in the process we notice that something new doesn’t have full support available for something how we want to use such technology, where we end up solving what looks like a common problem for ourselves. While building our own solution in such common problem, our basic approach is to release it to the public domain.

Startup Commons, together with Prifina - a Silicon Valley based consumer and developer focused personal data platform and Grow VC Group is co-developing a GraphQL Data Model Editor, a complete application where business and technical users collide to create, document, edit, manage, publish, populate, test, verify and deploy ecosystem open standard data models.

Standard data model development is needed to enable digital connectivity that allows ecosystem builders, developers, operators and other key ecosystem actors to share ecosystem data with peer entities supporting entrepreneurs and startups along the journey following MyData principles.

Making data accessible to between ecosystem applications, allows collaborating actors to build a better ecosystem level user experience, where view into progress of building/supporting innovations is more accurate, and where ecosystem builders, developers and operators can compare, analyze, measure and orchestrate ecosystem development more effectively, to make more sound decisions.

​In our internal setup, this published SLS data model can be deployed directly into AWS and used to spin up the needed backend setup. It can also be used to make amendments into the existing infrastructure, which naturally requires clear versioning, deployment protocols, and access controls.

We see the need for further development in at least the following areas:

1. Automated versioning (think Google docs)
2. User and access management
3. Setup to spin up fake data en masse to populate and test data model (using e.. Faker https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/)
4. Create a hosted version

We are scaling up our operations and building our digital team in different positions. What we are building is incredibly ambitious and we want to get inspired by anyone passionate about data, innovation and entrepreneurship, and as such, we have an open-door policy for those that want to get to know us, to connect with others and to share knowledge. We, as serial entrepreneurs, know and accept this risk but we don't know any other way to reach our vision for digital transformation applied to scaling innovation, entrepreneurship and ecosystem development. A tool to empower ecosystem builders with cutting edge capabilities to unlock ecosystem data and put data to work in favor of all ecosystem actors, bringing dramatic improvements in ecosystem orchestration. This is ecosystemOS.

Growth Academy is the worldwide leader in open and globally neutral knowledge for innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem actors and users. We focus on building a 360 degree understanding about startups and the journey through various perspectives and connecting all relevant startup related topics along with links to further keywords, resources and tools, for further self learnings and for taking theory to action.

Today, we are celebrating Startup Commons' involvement in MyData Global’s recently published paper, Understanding MyData Operators. It is a foundational step on a roadmap towards a human-centric personal data infrastructure that involved 34 experts and was supported by 48 personal data operators in 15 countries. The MyData vision published in 2015, describes operators as actors in personal data ecosystems, that provide infrastructure for human-centric personal data management and governance.