Engaging the Whole: Unlocking Talent by Connecting the Disconnected
[Dispatches from the ESHIP Summit Community Team]
In June 2017, 450 entrepreneurial ecosystem builders gathered in Kansas City for the first ESHIP Summit, a three-day conference convened by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and 54 national partners.
The goal: Advance the work of community leaders who focus on a collaborative and systematic approach to fostering more entrepreneurial starts and success in their area.
On the last day of the Summit, the event participants formed small groups around 12 common challenges in entrepreneurial ecosystem building and developed initial concepts for new tools, trainings, and shared understanding to help each other be more effective in their work. A summary of their collective work is available here.
The following post summarizes the specific group discussions about how to best engaging and supporting entrepreneurs who are traditionally and systematically disconnected from economic prosperity.
In communities everywhere the need for entrepreneurial talent is great. Yet there are still a significant number of people in every community’s population, who despite their potential, go under-recognized as contributors and remain disconnected from the most important economic opportunities in their ecosystem. Significant systemic barriers exist that limit access to opportunity for historically marginalized populations, and the positive economic impact of this missed opportunity is lost.
Ecosystem building organizations are well-positioned to facilitate connections between disconnected citizens and the entrepreneurial opportunities available. This hands-on work of unlocking and connecting a community’s talent, capital, and other resources to sustain a healthy economy could directly result in the breaking down of longstanding systemic barriers, while also developing more successful entrepreneurs. However, many ecosystem builders are not engaging in this work due to limited time, fear, and uncertainty about where and how to start.
At the ESHIP Summit in June 2017, we challenged a small group of entrepreneurial ecosystem builders to:
Create a set of resources to help ecosystem builders make diversity and inclusion a core imperative of their work.
We asked them to consider these questions as conversation starters:
- As ecosystem building emerges as a professional field, how can we ensure inclusion is a priority now and therefore integrated into everything we do?
- What specific steps could we take to identify and support more diverse leaders in the ecosystem?
- How would regional economic competitiveness initiatives be different if disconnected business owners were integrated into them?
- Beyond access to capital, what barriers can ecosystem builders work to remove to empower more disconnected and under-recognized citizens to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas?
- Knowing that scaling companies has an outsized impact on job and wealth creation, how can ecosystem builders help existing entrepreneurs in disconnected communities grow their businesses and hire more people?
The following outlines the new program & resource ideas the small groups developed at the first ESHIP Summit to help ecosystem builders make diversity and inclusion a core imperative of their work:
Roadmap for Ecosystem Builders
(Team 34)
An Inclusivity Canvas & Guide for ecosystem builders to foster greater inclusion in their entrepreneurial communities.
All Roads Lead to Entrepreneurial Opportunities
(Team 36)
A roadmap of tools, stories, and projects for connecting the disconnected to entrepreneurial opportunities.
Inclusive Ecosystem Movement Building Framework
(Team 37)
A framework for individuals and groups to connect marginalized people to entrepreneurship and unlock equity through social, financial, cultural, and political capital.
This framework, potentially titled The Entrepreneurial Equity Playsheet, lays out four quadrants for thinking about how we at once interact, resist, and leverage the current pathways to entrepreneurial opportunity while also living into redesigning and reimagining the system as a whole.
All-In
(Team 35)
An Ecosystem Builders’ Guide to increasing Diversity & Inclusion
Our Emerging Thoughts
As we at the ESHIP Summit Community Team reflect on this common ecosystem challenge and the notes from the teams’ work, the following thoughts surface:
We believe entrepreneurship is a fundamental human right.
Our founder, Ewing Marion Kauffman, believed that if you have an idea, you have a fundamental right to start a business to make it a reality. To bring this belief to life, the ESHIP Summit aims to help communities across the U.S. adopt and integrate entrepreneurial ecosystem building as a more inclusive model of economic development.
In our view, the great opportunity of entrepreneurial ecosystem building is for communities to systematically dismantle the longstanding structural barriers that keep large portions of our population (i.e. our talent pools) away from the economic prosperity that can come from building a business. Through more equitable access to entrepreneurship resources and capital networks, we can help narrow the wealth gap that is leaving a growing number of people in vicious cycles of poverty for generation after generation.
The first ESHIP Summit gathered hundreds of ecosystem building professionals ready to charge forward and create a more inclusive and equitable playing field for all entrepreneurs to start and grow their companies. The biggest need that surfaced among these professionals was for a guide to start and do inclusive ecosystem building well.
Next Steps
We recommend the development of a Guide to Inclusive Ecosystem Building. Key components of this guide to may include:
- An set of infographics depicting the entrepreneurial journey of diverse entrepreneurs and the barriers (visible and invisible) that they face along the way.
- A directory of promising programs, practices and solutions to the common barriers diverse entrepreneurs face.
- Create an inclusive language guide to help ecosystem builders from all backgrounds employ more accessible communication to engage more entrepreneurs.
- Draft a Top 10 list of ‘Things You Can Do Every Week to Engage & Support More Diverse Entrepreneurs and Ecosystem Leaders’
- Compile a list of books, films, podcasts, and other media to help gain empathy and understanding of the challenges facing often underrepresented groups.
How are you building an inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem?
We’d love to learn from your work and help others do the same. Tell us about the inclusive support system you are building for all entrepreneurs in your community. What obstacles are you facing? Which practices or programs are giving your work momentum? Leave a comments below or email playbook@kauffman.org. We looking forward to hearing from you!
