Are you still looking at how to catalyze entrepreneurial communities to ensure equity for every entrepreneur?

Forward Cities is a U.S.-based nonprofit equipping communities and regions to grow and sustain more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem. Forward Cities core team - Fay Horwitt, President of Forward Cities, Brett Brenton, Senior Director of Learning Networks, and Garrett Raczek, Senior Manager of Special Projects at Forward Cities - will cover the fundamentals around how to ensure equity for every entrepreneur.

On May 27th 2021 @ 3:00 PM EEST

They will also present a self-assessment tool to measure the health and equity of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This webinar is ideal for all ecosystem stakeholders wishing to reflect on the current systems of support and identify ways in which equity can be advanced through an ecosystem's: People, Programs, Networks, and Narratives.
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In the end of the session, there will be Q&A and experiences sharing from other ecosystem actors. Don't miss it out and book your place!

If there is a data model you would like us to improve or add, leave your request here and we will review to add it to our development plans to make it ecosystemOS compliant for global connectivity with other ecosystems. Or you can also subscribe to our ecosystemOS newsletter to keep you updated about the new data model releases.

One of the benefits of working in the innovation entrepreneurship landscape globally for many years is to identify best practices, common patterns and needs coming from all kind of ecosystem maturity levels, recognising opportunities and giving us the chance to focus on things that others are not really providing, where our ecosystem development expertise matter the most.

And the truth is that, while ecosystem builders and actors alike recognise and agree the ecosystem fragmentation as a big issue that must be resolved to enable true collaboration and accelerate ecosystem development, in practice, none is committed to fix it. The beast is so big that it seems it is "smarter" to just escape from it. But the beast doesn't stop growing more and more because we also contribute to make it bigger with our own ambitions and motivations.

We are always asking entrepreneurs to be leaders to make their companies succeed. Shouldn't we ask ecosystem builders and related actors to also behave as entrepreneurs? Shouldn't they have the guts to put the right things in place to make their ecosystem easier for anyone to land, navigate, connect and progress? In practice, there is a lack of true leadership to really tackle the ecosystem fragmentation.

At the end of the day, as anything, it is a personal decision and we can't do much on this. We can just make one thing: leading by example. Taking the global leadership to develop what is needed to enable ecosystem connectivity and interoperability within and between ecosystems.

Ecosystem fragmentation in practice means that we have applications (spreadsheets, CRMs, event systems, portals, etc.) with closed databases, where people put information in and pull information out, and whatever information is randomly shared, it is not connected in a systematic and consistent way. We have applications silos, meaning that people need to proactively move information between systems. 

At the core, the solution for ecosystem fragmentation lie the data model, which is the way elements of data are organized  and therefore standardise how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. Therefore data modelling is the first step towards removing ecosystem fragmentation and definitely to look at data as a key resource in the digital revolution to bring more efficiency at ecosystem level: designing a data model for information ecosystem. A model for what data and how is it stored & used.  But being developed as open standard to facilitate easier, faster and broader adoption, to improve information transfer and usage and ultimately increase innovation. 

From now on, we are making public the R​oadmap for Open Standard Data Model, covering domains and objects that are part of the innovation entrepreneurship landscape, providing details about entity types, attributes, relationships, integrity rules, and the definitions of those objects so that any ecosystem can iteratively use them for:

• Helping build common understanding of business data elements and requirements
• Providing foundation for designing databases
• Facilitating avoidance of data redundancy and thus prevent data & business transaction inconsistency
• Facilitating data re-use and sharing
• Decreasing development and maintenance time and cost

A first use case enabled with this first simple model is a global startup events portal to aggregate and distribute startup events data​. It provides a standards-based representation that can be used to encode and exchange events data in the context of innovation entrepreneurship format.

if there is a data model you would like us to improve or add, leave your request here and we will review to add it to our development plans to make it ecosystemOS compliant for global connectivity with other ecosystems. Or you can also subscribe to our ecosystemOS newsletter to keep you updated about the new data model releases.

We are right now in that technological leap similar to the one that occurred when the car was invented that drastically changed the mobility of people. We are right at that moment where the way in which innovation and entrepreneurship is facilitated is going to change. Are you going to stay behind? Take action now!

Boardio connects companies with skilled individuals available for advisory work. Boardio has a global pool of 3100+ candidates with skills and availability for advisory and board positions. Companies needing external advisors can post a recruitment ad for free and let interested advisors apply. Companies can also browse advisor base and contact the ones that seem to have skills needed.

Tuomo Virkkunen, founder of Boardio, covered in the Startup Commons Innovation Entrepreneurship Best Practices Webinar Series the benefits of using external advisors, introduced Boardio service, made a demo and told how accelerators and other ecosystem players can utilize Boardio to help companies within the ecosystem to succeed.  Get a quick understanding of Boardio here.

Early stage startup analysis is complex and 70%+ of investments fail.  Emphasis has always been put on TEAM is key, but to date no one addressed the big question of how do you measure team, compatibility, performance, experience, passion and vision.  Kiota is SaaS that allows investors of all type to analyse key metrics such as team, passion, vision and provides an in depth report with survival expectation, growth potential, valuation score and much more to investors.  Entrepreneurs can also self analyse their investment readiness by going through the process.

Kiota presented in the Startup Commons Innovation Entrepreneurship Webinar series how to help investors to analyse startups and scale ups by using robust artificial intelligence algorithms, and providing predictive capacity. Get a quick understanding of Kiota here.

On April 1st 2021 at 2.30 PM EET, Raul Estrada, CEO of Kiota, and Ali Parandeh, COO of Kiota, will present the Kiota SaaS product that allows investors of all type to analyse key metrics such as team, passion, vision and provides an in depth report with survival expectation, growth potential, valuation score and much more to investors. Entrepreneurs can also self analyse their investment readiness by going through the process.

The target group is especially Business Angels, Incubators, VCs as well as Entrepreneurs (free gift for entrepreneurs at the end).

In the end of the session, there will be Q&A and experiences sharing from other ecosystem actors. Don't miss it out and book your place​!

Feel free to contact us (info@startupcommons.org) in advance with your questions/suggestions.

And meanwhile, reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.

This webinar is a continuation of the "A Modern Technology Stack For Startup Ecosystem Orchestration" webinar we organised on February 16 in which we presented the conceptual model for next generation startup ecosystem development technology architecture. This time, we are presenting the set of tools that are part of ecosystemOS stack to initiate the journey towards managing ecosystem data as a key resource.

Valto Loikkanen, senior advisor and cofounder of Startup Commons, will run the session, guiding participants through the following topics:

• Key definitions and terminology
• Tools for product design, communication and workflow management, front-end development, back-end development, testing & QA and Hosting
• Data Flow Model
• Strategies to get started

This webinar is intended for digital government leaders, IT development teams working for economic development agencies, managers, architects and engineers therein and other interested public servants as well as private sector partners and academia.

Feel free to contact us  (info@startupcommons.org) in advance with your questions/suggestions.

Can't make it? No problem! Go ahead and sign up. We'll send the recording to everyone who registers for the event.

Both Global Enabler and Startup Commons believe that supporting innovation entrepreneurship is the best way to solve the problems that the world has and are worthwhile to be solved.

Understanding one common global challenge around the need for Financiers and Founders to find new methods and instruments to build trust with each other but also to improve the matchmaking process, we also believe and share that unlocking data and building data-driven approaches are key to enable this new model and eventually bringing more efficiency to the process of evaluating and scoring companies.

We presented HippoRadar, a digital tool to enable financiers and ecosystem actors alike to reliably and efficiently evaluate and rate companies for funding and support. Get a quick understanding of HippoRadar here.

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.