Unifying and Making Startup Ecosystems More Transparent And Accessible

Billion dollar startups are emerging faster and faster. Given innovative startups’ critical role in the information economy, the importance of healthy startup ecosystems only stands to increase in the future, being this the reason why local, regional and national governments across the world are establishing programs to support tech entrepreneurs in an effort to stimulate economic growth and job creation.

One quite common starting point to connect, support and grow a startup ecosystem is by mapping it in order to know 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". Some relevant reference cases related to that are Berlin Startup Map, Mapped in Israel or Digital NYC to name a few.

However, usually in this type of cases there’s an important speed gap between the showcased information and real startup ecosystem activity that generally becomes into outdated and inaccurate information for all user roles within the startup ecosystem, generating a lot of frustration.

The main reasons behind that result are:

• Big effort to collect information (ie not all information is up to date, easy to find or publicly available to do proper mapping)
• Maintaining the correctness of the information and also to improve the quality of the information (ie. about changing programs and their availability, events and event overlaps, funding applications and requirements, services and whom those are targeted for, new startups born and existing making their pivots, new talents, etc.)

Therefore, the level of maintaining the basic information and improving quality and completeness of the information becomes "continuous effort to sustain", so more systematic and sustainable solution is eventually needed.

Countries like Vietnam are implementing digital backbone to digitally connect and visualize Vietnam startup ecosystem functions to stimulate further innovation in its emerging tech scene with the objective to collect, maintain, distribute, showcase and use vietnamese startup ecosystem information on real-time to benefit all parties involved.

This Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure solution has the architecture to connect these manual mapping efforts with systematic approach to get primary measurable data from the startup ecosystem and one key component connected to this digital infrastructure via API's is the ecosystem view module that can showcase all the information and resources of cities' digital economy in one place, visualising the pulse of startup ecosystem functions by startup development phase, location, industry, time, etc. helping people and startups find the right services and connections at the right time and also helping public & private sector decision makers and service providers target their services to the specific needs of the startups and other ecosystem actors.

Vietnam Startup Ecosystem View Mockup

​This ecosystem view provides access to tools, services and support needed to turn ideas into real businesses, including:

• Access to relevant events
• Access to relevant services (support, funding, permits, etc.)
• Access to relevant discussions and news
• Access to relevant tools assisting the company building
• Effective matching for connections, hands-on assistance, motivational support

Additionally, from local/national economic development or innovation agencies as well as supporting organizations perspective, the ecosystem view module turns the collected information into actionable knowledge to improve and redesign existing programs, services, funding schemes, etc or to create new ones as fast as possible, getting for example:

• Key volume and quality metrics
• Relative impacts between metrics of different activities/services
• Connections between actors
• “Map” to display the completeness and balance of the services and illustrate the need for new services or change of cous in overlapping services
• Compare investment to quality and quantity of outputs
• Knowledge about quality of teams and ideas
• Knowledge about customer progress and stages

Vietnam Startup Ecosystem Metrics Mockup

​Overall, this digital ecosystem view simplifies things and makes the startup ecosystem more transparent and all parties can get more benefits from them. Additionally, by just adding startup development phases layer, it provides the right services at the right time. This alone is valuable for the future. The digital ecosystem approach is all about better access, transparency and efficiency. This, along with the statistical data that this it generates, leads to accelerated development of all areas it spreads to and effectively connects a city or country with the new digital finance world. 

In addition to the digital solution and architecture, another key component is the shared source licensing model, mainly developed for public sector constraints and known challenges, allowing them to get access to source code to give them full freedom to develop any adjustments, functionalities, new features etc. as they like either with existing or external development resources.  Parallely, as we are working globally with other cities and countries and building everything under the same technological infrastructure,whenever a city develops a new functionality, it becomes available at no cost to the rest of cities, which  drives down everyones new development associated costs. Also, there is no vendor lock, being able to keep the full software and freely continue to develop it further as independent software.

If you want to explore how this digital solution fits on top of the work you are doing now to support startups and innovation to go further with what you’ve got, then contact us to organise a workshop to take your startup ecosystem to the next level.

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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