​​​Evaluation of applications
Three main evaluation criteria are; excellence in form of being relevant to the topic of the call, impact, quality and efficiency of the implementation, including self sustainability (how things developed in the project can continued without support).
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See further evaluation criteria in more detail here.

Developing a plan for a consortium project based on call details?
Building one single digital entry point for your ecosystem, actively connecting between ecosystems and to Startup Europe in a self sustainable manner, is not as simple as manually collecting information from different sources and put it on a map or some application. Key points here are “actively” (should not be only manual) and “self sustainable manner” (how things developed in the project can continued without support).

The more there is manual work involved the harder it is to make connections active and self sustaining. Also as one of the new key focuses on this call is deep tech, also solutions developed and build as part of the project itself, should naturally look into utilizing deep tech approaches. Combining, these mean how to get the information (data) flow more automatically and how to make that data into high quality. If these are considered, then there will also be opportunities towards more deep tech solutions to develop later, like use of AI.

What could be a focus for a project to apply funding to?

Permanently fix the ecosystem fragmentation problem and begin the digital transformation journey within and between ecosystems taking part in your consortium.

In startup ecosystems, founders looking for co­founders, talent looking for ideas and support, investors looking to invest, companies looking for partners, lenders looking to provide working capital, corporates looking new innovations to existing problems and opportunities for their customers and markets. The list goes on and on.
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Everyone and anyone trying to find what they are looking for from startup ecosystems suffer from fragmented, limited and outdated information. So easy access and use of accurate key information (data) about the things they are looking to understand and about people and companies they are looking to connect and do business with is a key for everyone.

As long as any given  startup ecosystem develops and grows, it has to scale its own programs, services, activities, processes, projects, people and resources in general. This rapid pace of change is compelling to provide a more transparent vision of the ongoing developing and evolving ecosystem in order to communicate in effective way to all users in the ecosystem relevant information such as what is going on in the startup ecosystem, who are doing what and why, where and when are things happening or how different parties can "get in on it all".​

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​Additionally, there’s an important speed gap between and disconnectivity with the showcased information and ecosystem performance metrics (KPI’s) with the real startup ecosystem activity that generally becomes into outdated and inaccurate information for all user roles within the startup ecosystem, generating a lot of frustration to users and inefficiency at ecosystem level.

When we have been evaluating the core problem, it’s not that the information would not exist or about missing or wrong applications per se, it’s often about manual and/or non sustainable strategy and solution that is applied in projects supporting an ecosystem to increase connectedness. We have validated this problem several times globally. 

Instead a solution needs to focus on an application connectivity framework and not just a manually populated portal approach, with an open standard ecosystem level data model and related data sharing practices. To establish a digital backbone to enable application level connectivity that can be built step by step and API connections to share data more automatically can be added one by one with smart architecture approach. 

This needs to be done in a way where during and after setup is in place and any individual connection created, each connected application and data owner can separately decide from their connectivity settings in the system, what data they want to share and under what terms also taking into account GDPR compliance for users to be able to make their data portable between applications without having dependency in any single application. 

In such setup, a startup ecosystem one stop shop can then be added “on top” to showcase all real-time information flowing within the system about ecosystem people, startups, events, support services, development projects and beyond. 

Also this type of setup enable software developers or managers of any application to enable connectivity from and to their application to all other existing ecosystem applications via single API gateway connection (instead of multiple different connections directly between multiple applications), and also to build totally new ecosystem applications based on data and connections within the system.

If you need inspiration, please check out Startup Commons ecosystemOS model which is especially designed based on these global learnings.

​​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.

So based on these assumptions, we have outlined the process of building a startup that would have an optimum chance of success from the funding and growth point of view.
This process could be over simplified and there are many other factors as well. But it’s important for us to explain the main process:


​1) The first risk to avoid is to be too dependent on one entrepreneur where one would have such ownership that he or she alone could make all decisions. So the core structure / ownership will need to be built, so that also looking from a funders point of view, there is more than one committed entrepreneur. So at least a core team of two or three is advised (since a 50/50 split can be problematic as well). More than three depends on the business model, roles, ownership %, etc.

​​2) Other team members. The next step is getting various other contacts committed to support and offer expertise and funding when needed, without too much effort. These people can typically be ex-colleagues, business contacts and other close contacts that you have built. They are the type of contacts that you know and they know you. So real trust is based on those relationships

3) Next you will need an ecosystem: outside experts that are not in your personal and inner circle:  They are the ones bringing in the “outsiders viewpoint” and the contacts that would normally be out of your reach without a bigger effort. You must be able to convince enough of these types of people and get them involved with your start-up as well.

​4) When you have shown traction with external experts, and they are committed to help you by sharing their contacts and expertise and recommending you to others, your startup has reached a level where you are starting to look more appealing to funders. Of course, this is only looking at your startup structure and people involved with it. The value of the idea and the quality of your product must be competitive as well.


In Startup Commons, our focus is to scale entrepreneurship and innovation by empowering ecosystem development with global knowledge and tools for data-driven development. 
This because growth and success of the ecosystem is dependent on how well support services are designed and implemented.

​We wanted to do this for “weekend reading”, as weekends are good time to relax and enjoy some longer posts and do some thinking. If you watch all the videos linked to this post you can easily spend close to an hour with these, so we made this post so that it can be easily enjoyed even via your iPhone while laying on the couch. 
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Are entrepreneurs born or made?

Every now and then, there are talks going on about “are entrepreneurs born or made?”. We are not sure if there is a real answer to that or not, but what’s pretty clear regardless, is that to become a successful entrepreneur, there are many different things that can help you to become one.
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Few key points:

• start paying attention to things around you
• realize what things could or should be different
• learn to enjoy continuous learning

We think that entrepreneurs are born with an entrepreneurial mindset, behavior and thinking, just like having some other personality features that one may have. However, this does not mean that all these people with entrepreneurial mindset will become entrepreneurs, or that someone without this mindset would not become one. It may well be that we all have these entrepreneurial minds, but some have stronger minds than others. This may well be the difference between an entrepreneur and a great entrepreneur.

Regardless of how it is, there is a path to becoming a great entrepreneur, some people can follow it, while some can’t and some only go half way. In every entrepreneur’s mind, at some point, it’s clear and you realize that you are an entrepreneur. This path – to become an entrepreneur – is why I wanted to write this post.

While we were thinking on how to do this post and thinking of some analogies to explain some of the key points, we started to think clips from the movie “Matrix”. Our plan was to only use few clips from Matrix and then some other stuff, but as we started to search for suitable clips in YouTube, we realized that we could build the whole post around clips taken from the Matrix. 

The path of becoming an entrepreneur

While you’re watching the clips below, try to replace the roles in the movie with those occurring in the entrepreneurial and startup world, like mentors, service providers (experts), business angels, team members, corporations, venture capitalist etc. and enjoy!

Learn to question the functions of the existing models

At some point you start become aware that you may indeed be an entrepreneur. Sometimes you realize that yourself and sometimes someone else will see it in you before you do, and starts to talk to you about it. – When you feel yourself questioning many things around you – you need to go and meet other people that are entrepreneurs. People with ideas & passion and those that have done it before.

Learning to question the existing models will lead to finding “new and better ways of doing things” and that’s the most natural path to come up with a great idea for a startup.
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​Startup Commons has released entire Growth Academy innovation entrepreneurship curriculum training materials with more than 700+ slides, along with supporting booklets​ for free co-development and use.
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All is released under Creative Commons licensing and in editable format.​​​

The curriculum is built, designed and refined over the years to increase the volume of entrepreneurship and likelihood of startup success by focusing on removing or reducing the biggest “universal risks” and to educate about optimal methods and structures.
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The base knowledge shared via these trainings is accumulation of more than twenty years of international serial entrepreneurship experience combined with more than ten years of parallel experience on startup advisory. 

➡️ ​If you are interested join our facebook groups:
Startup Ecosystem Developers
Innovation Entrepreneurship Education providers/trainers

​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.