The ESHIP Summit + The National Resource Providers (NRPs): A Progress Report

A mural painted by street artists Sike Stye during the 2017 ESHIP Summit

In 2017, The Kauffman Foundation, with the support of 54 National Resource Providers (NRPs), launched the ESHIP Summit — a three-year, three-stage initiative to 1) discover, 2) design and 3) deliver the foundational pillars needed for the emerging field of entrepreneurial ecosystem building to gain more widespread adoption.

We are now half-way through the initiative — in the midst of the “design” year — and we’re excited to share a mid-program update with you, the National Resource Providers (NRPs) — which we define as organizations that provide training, support programs and funding to entrepreneurial ecosystem builders across the U.S. and beyond.

We’d also like to add more seats to the table by inviting more NRPs to join the ESHIP Community, as we work to accelerate and expand the field of ecosystem building.

This post is intended as an update for those who have been with us since the beginning, and to provide some context to the invitation, for those just joining us.

After the first ESHIP Summit, we hosted calls with representatives from nearly all 54 NRPs who helped us launch the program, to better understand ecosystem builder and NRP needs, and to collect feedback on our process and proposed road map. Special thanks to Amanda West and Enoch Elwell for leading those conversations and for all of you who took the time to speak with us.

We have used the input and recommendations from this discovery phase of our work to design the next steps in this initiative — your input is greatly appreciated and has deeply informed where we’re headed.

The following are the top 6 recommendations we heard from NRP representatives, and below are short updates on what actions we have taken on these recommendations — with the aim of adding value to your engagement with the ESHIP Summit.

National Resource Provider (NRP) Top Recommendations:

1. Clarify and Be More Transparent on the Plan + Vision for the ESHIP Summit: Continue to hone and communicate the intention, opportunity and plan the ESHIP Summit offers.
2. Invest in Community Building: Invest in a dedicated community building manager or team to lead the evolution of the Summit initiative from an event to a network of interlocking communities of practice.
3. Empower More Inclusive Ecosystem Building Practice: Continue to be a lead champion of inclusive ecosystem building and empower the field to do the work of inclusive ecosystem building well.
4. Grow Awareness of Existing Ecosystem Building Resources: Help the field map itself, to help everyone see the larger whole and identify where they can make the most impact and/or collaborate with others more.
5. Foster Collaboration to Strengthen the Field + Develop Resources Together: Help foster more collaborations among the National Resource Providers (NRPs) and bring interested NRPs deeper into the fold of the Summit and ESHIP Goal Work.
6. Facilitate Collective Action Through Small Working Groups: Focus on facilitating small group work between ecosystem building practitioners and NRPs to advance the field of ecosystem building, in the following directions: 1) Better defining the field 2) Empowering more inclusive ecosystem building 3) Advancing collaborations and solutions around the 7 ESHIP Goals (more on this below).

Here’s some steps we’ve taken to deliver on the six top recommendations.

Recommendation 1: Clarify and be more transparent on the vision and plan for the ESHIP Summit

(Note: if you’ve been following closely with the program’s progress, you may wish to skip this section of the update, and start at Recommendation #2).

Since launching the ESHIP Summit in 2017, we’ve been able to synthesize more of what we are hearing and seeing in response to our early work. This has helped us better articulate the aims of the ESHIP Summit. Here’s some history and context on where the ESHIP Summit work is headed…

The Vision

The Kauffman Foundation launched the ESHIP Summit, with the aim of taking a community-driven approach to accelerating the emerging field of entrepreneurial ecosystem building.

The underlying belief was simple: Entrepreneurship benefits all of us — it empowers individuals, improves standards of living throughout a community, and creates jobs, wealth and innovation in the economy.

But despite these benefits, entrepreneurial activity in the United States has been on the decline for decades — exacerbated by barriers facing specific populations. Yet, a new approach to helping entrepreneurs seems to be emerging at the intersection of economic and community development — the practice of “entrepreneurial ecosystem building.”

The building of more robust “ecosystems” has grown in prominence over the last two decades, and more and more community leaders are adopting an “ecosystem building” approach — seeding what seems a new emerging approach to economic development (read more in the draft Ecosystem Building Playbook).

Building The ESHIP Community

In 2017, we reached out to 54 National Resource Providers (NRPs) (see the list below) to help us co-create the first ESHIP Summit. Together, we identified hundreds of people taking an ecosystem-level approach to increasing entrepreneurial activity in their communities and invited them to the first Summit. These “early adopters” of ecosystem building have been doing this important work despite the lack of widely adopted approaches, tools and metrics for ecosystem building.

Our initial NRP collaborators in 2017:

We are two years into the journey of accelerating the emergence of a professional field around ecosystem building and are now working in concert with a growing community of 1000+ ecosystem builders and the NRPs who support them. Together, we’ve made some progress.

Progress To Date: The ESHIP Goals

Through two Summits, and work in between, the ESHIP Community has identified 7 ESHIP Goals to serve as a set of collective objectives for the field to prioritize, organize, and collaborate, as we work together to improve the effectiveness of our field as a whole and, as a result, the effectiveness of individual ecosystem builders everywhere. Achieving these goals will strengthen our profession and accelerate its adoption in more communities — removing more barriers for more entrepreneurs.

You can dive deeper into the ESHIP Goals here.

The community is also in the final stages of identifying a first batch of 32 targeted Goal Initiatives that we collectively believe will get us closer to achieving the 7 ESHIP Goals — these initiatives identify concrete projects that can be undertaken by organizations and collaborative groups across the emerging field — we’ll dive deeper into these leading up to the 2019 Summit.

Some examples of ESHIP Goal Initiatives include:

• Fieldwide Mission, Vision, Values and Outcomes — Create and build wider consensus around these foundational aspects of the emerging field.
• Ecosystem Building Toolkit — Create an open access directory of resources available from across the field to support those building entrepreneurial ecosystems.
• Public Policy Playbook to Support Entrepreneurs and Ecosystem Builders — A playbook of policy practices that best support entrepreneurial ecosystems.

At the 2019 ESHIP Summit — May 21–23, 2019 in Kansas City — we will take the next steps in bringing to life some pilot projects of the first batch of ESHIP Goal Initiatives.

Continue reading to learn more about where you can help.

Recommendation #2: Invest in Community Building

As promised at the 2018 ESHIP Summit, the Kauffman Foundation brought on two “community activators” to support the growing ESHIP Community and our collective work to solve for the ESHIP Goals — with the aim of helping you better connect into the growing ESHIP Community network and find ways to move your work and the growing field forward.

I’m happy to introduce:

• Christine Lai, an ecosystem builder and community activator, originally from California — who will focus on working with the growing community of NRP organizations and representatives (that’s you!).

(From left to right) Andy Stoll (that’s me) on the left. Cecilia Wessinger, Christine Lai, and Enoch Elwell (who many of you had phone conversations with last year)

• Cecilia Wessinger, an ecosystem builder from Tulsa (and two time ESHIP Summit participant) who has been working since October 2018 in supporting the ESHIP Goal Working Groups and the ecosystem building practitioners in the ESHIP Community.

Recommendation #3: Empower More Inclusive Ecosystem Building Practice

For those who have participated at a previous Summit, you know the immense opportunity we have to create a new approach to economic development that builds an economy that includes everyone. We see both the economic and social imperatives of baking inclusion into building the emerging field.

Past Summit participants also know that we’ve worked hard to ensure that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were essential themes throughout past Summits.

In 2017, immense energy bubbled up amongst the delegation around the DEI programming and in 2018, we partnered with Change Catalyst — a fellow NRP — to deliver a half-day session, exploring issues and opportunities around DEI in ecosystem building (you can revisit those inspiring talks here).

Partially in response to your feedback, we’ve worked to increase our emphasis on DEI throughout the draft playbook. We are committed to doing our part to ensure that diverse leadership is modeled in the field. Additionally, we continue to commit to raising awareness and telling stories of ecosystem builders from diverse communities — see this example, featuring Andres Wydler, executive director of fellow NRP, Startout. Thank you to everyone who continues to champion inclusion as an essential element of our collective work.

Recommendation #4: Grow Awareness of Existing Ecosystem Building Resources

At the 2018 Summit, we began working with two NRPs — CO.STARTERS and SourceLink — to start to catalog and map existing ecosystem building tools — with input from all of you. We’ve catalogued more than 500 organizations and tools that support ecosystem building. We hope to share an early prototype of a digital product at the 2019 ESHIP Summit, with the long-term goal to create a widely accessible database that all of us can use to promote our programs, tools and resource to the wider universe. Learn more here.

Finally, we hope you will be able to join us for the 2019 ESHIP Summit. The first day of the event is designed for your organization to showcase, demo and share your programs with a room full of ecosystem builders and entrepreneurial support organizations.

Recommendation #5: Foster Collaboration to Strengthen the Field + Develop Resources Together

Nearly 100 of you participated in a pre-summit NRP Convening just before the 2018 ESHIP Summit. That gathering generated an immense amount of energy, sparked great conversations and hopefully provided more insight into Kauffman’s behind-the-scenes work to build the ESHIP Summit.

We’ll be hosting a similar pre-summit NRP Convening at the 2019 event, from 1–4pm on Tue, May 21st, 2019 (the 2019 ESHIP Summit starts at 5pm that day). This will be our next in-person group conversation to explore collaboration opportunities to strengthen our field and develop resources together.

As mentioned, Christine Lai has joined our team to increase coordinated efforts and activate collaboration amongst the NRP community — and I hope you can spend some time with her in the near future.

Recommendation #6: Facilitate Collective Action Through Small Working Groups

Using the framework of the ESHIP Goals, we can (and must) do a lot together to build our field.

In September 2018, we launched working groups around each of the 7 ESHIP Goals. Since then, more than 110 people have engaged in nearly 70 working group calls to further refine the ESHIP Goals and design initiatives that map towards helping us achieve the goals. We’ll revisit that progress at the 2019 Summit.

As you and your organization gain a deeper understanding of the ESHIP Goals and Goal Initiatives — we are inviting all NRPs to make a “goal commitment” that aligns with your mission — a public commitment of leadership, time, money and/or other resources, to help achieve one or more of the ESHIP Goals.

Following the 2019 ESHIP Summit, as we enter the “deliver” stage of our collective work, we aim to launch pilot projects of some of the identified ESHIP Goal Initiatives and we’ll need your help. NRPs will play an important role in this process and we want to find the win-win opportunities that can add new programs to your organization that better serve the field and create more opportunities for you to increase your impact.

Again, Christine Lai, our community activator, will be working with you this year to better understand the opportunity and work involved in a ESHIP Goal commitment, pilot projects and what opportunities it may provide for you and your organization. More to come.

WHAT’S NEXT…

As we enter the second half of the ESHIP Summit initiative, we are very committed to bringing the field together to collaborate on delivering the 7 ESHIP Goals. We want to work with each and every one of you, and the more than a thousand practitioners, to deliver on new programs, practices and policies that will increase your impact and accelerate the emergence of the ecosystem building field. You are an essential part of this work — only together can we change our economy, build communities and unlock entrepreneurial opportunities for all.

We hope you will join us as we move forward, here’s the next steps:

1. Attend the next ESHIP Summit, May 21–23, 2019 in Kansas City, and share your current programs, practices and policies that help support ecosystem builders in the growing field. The first half of the 2019 Summit is designed to showcase NRPs and their resources, and the second half of the Summit is about how we can build even more resources to grow the field.
2. We invite NRPs to make a leadership-level goal commitment to one (or more) of the ESHIP Goals, or a specific goal initiative, by the end of 2019. Here’s the 3-step process:

> Step #1: Learn: Join us on an ESHIP Summit + NRPs Info Webinar Session. We’re hosting two video sessions coming up, choose your favorite:

• Wednesday, March 28th, 10-11am CT (event concluded)
• Thursday, April 4th, 4–5pm CT (event concluded)
• Did you miss the webinars?
  >> Here’s is the presentation deck

> Step #2: Explore: Questions? Schedule a 1:1 call with Christine Lai, our NRP community activator to share an update on the latest with your organization, explore showcase opportunities at the 2019 ESHIP Summit, and learn more about what makes a great Goal commitment. Schedule a call here.

> Step #3 Commit: Make a leadership-level commitment of time, leadership, money and/or other resources towards one (or more) ESHIP Goal or Goal Initiative that aligns with your work. We’re collecting our first round of commitments through the end of the year. Those who make commitments prior to the 2019 ESHIP Summit will be eligible for further promotion and grant opportunities. We look forward to exploring the possibilities with you.

Thank you for reading along and digesting all of the progress we’ve made in less than two years. I’d like to thank each and every one of you who has joined us at the Summit, joined for a working group call and/or provided support, encouragement and feedback to move our community forward — and with it the field of ecosystem building.

I’d like to give a special shout out to Amanda West and Enoch Elwell, who have spent more than 200+ hours hosting phone calls with 50+ NRP organizations and worked to synthesize and distill what was shared into the clear set of recommendations outlined in this post. I’d also like to thank Christine Lai and Cecilia Wessinger, who made the move from community members to “community activators” in October 2018, to help empower and support more collaboration and communication across the growing ESHIP Community.

Building a field while supporting more than 1,000 people and hundreds of organizations is complex — and often messy — but the growing momentum within and around the field of ecosystem building has been energizing and thrilling to watch. Much more work is ahead, but the power of community to drive progress so far has been so inspiring. Thank you for the important work you do — it really makes a difference.

Please feel free to leave comments below or email me directly at astoll@kauffmanfoundation.org.

Keep building,

Andy Stoll
Senior Program Officer, Ecosystem Development & Measurement
The Kauffman Foundation