The fifth Ecosystem Health Challenge kicked off in February 2022 and finished in late May. Ecosystem leaders from Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Tulsa participated in the program. This group learned about metrics, storytelling, and how to create strategic focus on achieving ecosystem change and growth. Each of the communities provided a different lens on ecosystem building because one key element of the Challenge is discovering how communities are different.
“The Ecosystem Health Challenge was an excellent introduction to not just new ways to measure entrepreneurial ecosystems, but how to use metrics to set ecosystem building strategies and tell better stories about how ecosystem building efforts are improving ecosystem health. I learned about so many new data sets and ways to use them to assess ecosystems and ecosystem building efforts.” - Andy Stoll, Senior Program Officer, Ecosystem Development, Kauffman Foundation
Being able to accurately reflect your community’s uniqueness and tell that story was a key deliverable for most of the communities. This means being able to take information (that many discovered as part of the homework in the class) and turn it into a compelling narrative. For example, understanding different jobs and location quotients helped one community better understand their talent pipeline and how they could communicate that with potential funders. Another community took that same data and was able to identify different types of startups that were happening but needed a common thread to be compelling. In other words, the Health Challenge is not just for learning about metrics but learning about strategy with metrics becoming a key component of validation and narrative support.
“It was interesting to hear so many perspectives this time regarding storytelling and its importance. When we first started, the narrative construct and storytelling was a smaller part of the classes, but it is becoming the thing that really translates for many communities.” - Tom Chapman
To date, the Ecosystem Health Challenge has helped over 25 ecosystems of all kinds better understand ecosystem metrics, how to use them, and why they’re important. Some ecosystems, like in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, used the knowledge they learned to secure $5M in grants.
"When I started the Ecosystem Health Challenge I was about 9 months into my role as the Director. We had just come back from the SCN Summit in Madison and we had started talking about this big grant for our region to figure out how we could better build out the ecosystem based on a report that showed a lot of gaps. When writing the $1.2M grant, we were trying to figure out how the heck to talk about our region, why it was right for investment. Going through the Ecosystem Health Challenge helped me understand how to talk about data, how to frame data, and how to run data. I learned so much and it directly produced all of the data for our grant, which then led to us winning the grant." - Debbie Irwin, Executive Director, Shenandoah Community Capital Fund
In Fort Worth, the team uncovered a growing field in their ecosystem through the “cool jobs” and location quotients activity.
“Figuring out your location quotient shows where you have a concentration of certain kinds of jobs. And that tells you where you have a concentration of expertise, of labor, and of companies that are hiring that kind of person. And so the thesis here, if you extrapolated it out, is to identify the kind of startup ecosystem you need to build because those people are already there,” explains Cameron Cushman, Assistant VP of Innovation Ecosystems, UNT Health Science Center. He attended the Challenge with colleagues in the ecosystem, which was hugely beneficial for them.
“We learned so much from Tom Chapman like how to think about data and how to think about your ecosystem. Bringing in my peers was eye opening when it came to seeing how they interpreted the content. It forced us to have conversations in our own community,” says Cameron.
The 6th Ecosystem Health Challenge launches December 20, 2022 with an informal organizing session to determine regular class meetings. Full session content will begin in January.
“Its so fun to get to know the participants and for them to get to know each other. I have loved how much different people help each other because of the cohort structure,” says Tom.