Join readers of Ecosystem Edge for tips, strategies, and resources to launch, grow, and sustain your innovation ecosystem.
Your glue work isn't overhead. It's infrastructure.
|
"The glue work of ecosystem builders is foundational and essential, and articulating its value effectively is key to its protection and continuation." 🔗 From Compliance to Connection Webinar The Question That Stops Ecosystem Builders ColdAfter a combined 48+ years navigating ecosystem building, innovation strategy, and economic development, we've seen one question derail more ecosystem leaders than any other: "What's your ROI?" You know the work is foundational. Building trust. Preventing duplication. Weaving connections that make entire systems work. But translating it into the language funders understand? That's where even the most experienced builders struggle. Last year, ecosystem builders across the country began to lose critical funding. Not because the work wasn't valuable—because it was invisible. Funders couldn't see it, so they cut it. That's why we partnered with Social Venturers and EcoMap Technologies to tackle this head-on in our recent webinar: From Compliance to Connection: How Ecosystem Builders Can Protect What Matters and Demonstrate ROI. This month's newsletter breaks down the approach we shared, with practical steps you can implement immediately to protect your coordination work and demonstrate measurable value. The Builder's Dilemma: Three Capabilities, One Missing Piece🔥 Here's the tension every ecosystem builder faces: Effective ecosystem building requires three distinct capabilities: 🔨 Building authentic relationships and trust Most ecosystem builders naturally excel at the first two. The third? That's where brilliant builders get stuck—and defunded. The environment isn't helping. We're operating in a BANI Environment: Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible. Funding cycles are shrinking. Political instability is rising. Pressure on builders to "show impact" has never been more intense. Meanwhile, the coordination work that prevents $2M in duplication or accelerates deals by six months? It gets labeled "overhead". 🧠 The uncomfortable truth: The most critical work in ecosystem building is also the hardest to fund. We're talking about the invisible infrastructure. This is the relationship maintenance, partner alignment, information flow systems, and coordination mechanisms that enable everything else to work. Your glue work isn't overhead. It's critical regional infrastructure. And infrastructure requires investment. We covered real examples: Business Oregon's hub-and-spoke model demonstrates how coordination leads to less waste and new funding opportunities. That "coffee meeting intel" you're capturing? It's social capital building that opens doors and outcomes. Watch the Full WebinarReady to master this approach and learn from live examples and audience Q&A? The complete session is available here:
|
Ecosystem Edge
Join readers of Ecosystem Edge for tips, strategies, and resources to launch, grow, and sustain your innovation ecosystem.
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." — William Bruce Cameron Dear Ecosystem Builders, He'd spent seven years building the regional ecosystem. Knew every partner. Could tell you the founding story of half the organizations on the list. But when a funder asked which relationships were actually moving the needle, he went quiet. Not because the work wasn't real. Because he never had a way to show it. That moment isn't a failure of one person....
"Entrepreneurial ecosystem building requires perseverance. The work is arduous and often ambiguous, and it can take 20 years to see concrete results." — Kauffman Foundation, Ecosystem Building Playbook 3.0 Hi Reader, If you feel like the ground keeps shifting under your feet, or the goal posts keep moving, you're not imagining it. We've been in a lot of rooms lately. Running workshops, facilitating sensemaking, sitting in on funder calls. We keep hearing the same things. Not complaints, more...
"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change." — Albert Einstein Welcome to the first Ecosystem Edge of 2026. To kick-start the new year, we're not making predictions. We're naming patterns. Last fall, we ran our Ecosystem Edge Scorecard with 21 ecosystem builders across the country. We asked them to assess their relationships across nine partner types and four phases of ecosystem development. No fancy software, just honest self-assessment using colored discs on a grid. The patterns...