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 like a collective exhale when someone finally names what everyone's experiencing.
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And to be clear, naming what's happening isn't complaining, it's risk management. The ecosystems that get stronger are the ones where people can candidly share what they're seeing and collectively course correct early. That's how you ensure the work lasts.

Part of our job at Ecosystem Edge is to help ecosystem builders see around corners; naming what's coming before it arrives, connecting patterns across regions, trusting what they're sensing. So let's name what we're all seeing.

The timeline mismatch

​Brad Feld's Boulder Thesis says ecosystem transformation takes 20 years. Kauffman's work confirms it. MIT REAP treats their rigorous two-year engagement as the beginning; a foundation, not a finish line.

Now layer in technology development. Moving research from lab to market takes 10-15 years. The "valley of death" is well-documented, and it's called that for a reason. Most technologies don't make it beyond the lab. That's not failure. That's how R&D works. It's experimental by definition and often doesn’t pass the rigorous test for commercialization.

So, ecosystem transformation takes 20 years, technology translation takes 10-15, and yet we're measuring success on 1-3 year grant cycles!

The math doesn't work.

Funding arrives in short tranches, tied to milestones that force competition among partners, is subject to annual appropriations, and vulnerable to political shifts. Ecosystem work is emergent, nonlinear, and risky. But our funding structures treat risk as uncertainty and therefore something to eliminate rather than manage.

Some would say that's how government works. We'd push back. These are design choices. Steady base funding instead of boom-and-bust tranches; metrics that reward collaboration instead of competition; appropriations that match the timeline of the work - none of this is impossible and logically should be part of effective strategic planning and risk management. It requires deciding that long-term regional capacity matters more than short-term political wins.

Activity vs. depth

We keep seeing regions with 50, 100, 200+ partners on paper. They look great in proposals.

But when we ask, "How much do partners trust each other? What mutual value have they discovered? What meaningful impact has been achieved?" the room gets quiet.

Most partnerships are stuck at awareness without the depth of real engagement . Activity matters in years one and two: meetings held, MOUs signed, logos collected. But activity often gets mistaken for progress. Real momentum starts when you begin measuring resources shared, risks taken together, joint experiments, outcomes co-owned, and a collective commitment to delivering real impact.

No one is doing this wrong. The incentives push toward volume (activities) and quick wins. Volume (read: ‘busy-ness’) is easier to count than depth.

And when funding shifts, the partners who redirect their energy aren't being disloyal. They're being responsible stewards of their own sustainability and capacity. The ones building something real stay in honest conversation when conditions change. They re-scope, re-define or step back without blame.

The Builder's Dilemma at a systems level

Let's be honest about what's happening.

There's the work that gets funded: ribbon cuttings, press releases, job numbers that land before the next election. This ‘success’ is measured on a 12-month cycle.

And then there's the work that matters: trust between partner groups that takes years to build, relationships that survive funding transitions, capacity to support technologies that won't reach market for a decade, ability to facilitate the transformation of the startup founders.

Everyone says they care about the second. But the incentives, the metrics, the reporting cycles are all designed for the first.

This is The Builder's Dilemma at scale. The work that creates meaningful impact is invisible. The work that gets measured isn't what matters. Builders are caught in between, doing the relational work that compounds over time while being asked to prove short-term value in ways that can't capture it.

So here's the question we keep coming back to:

Are we building America's technology and innovation backbone? Or are we funding things that look like progress in headlines, but won't outlast the next appropriations cycle?

Those are different investments. And right now, it's not clear which one we're making.

What ecosystem builders can do

You have more agency than the system leads you to believe.

• Remember what you control. Communities control relationships, local knowledge, and commitment to place. Funders control budgets and timelines. The elements that compound over time (trust, culture, social capital) belong to you. The money accelerates what you're building. It doesn't create it. That's not a small thing. That's everything.
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• Measure what matters. Track partnership depth, not partner counts. Document which relationships have moved from awareness to active collaboration. You may never put this in a grant report, but you'll know what you've built, and that knowledge is power when the next funding cycle comes around. Data is an input. Sensemaking is the work.
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• Design for transition. Every grant ends. Have honest conversations early about what happens when funding shifts. Normalize rescoping as evolution, not failure. The partners who can have these conversations are the ones worth keeping.
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• Protect your energy. You will be asked to justify 20-year work on 1-year cycles. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign the system isn't designed for what you're building.

What funders can do

• Match timelines to reality. Ecosystem transformation takes 20 years. Technology commercialization takes 10-15. If you're funding 1-year tranches, call it what it is: a pilot that will need to be advocated for each year.
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• Fund the invisible work. Coordination, convening, relationship maintenance, communication. This is the infrastructure, the glue, that holds everything together. It's not overhead. It's the point! Set expectations with those that approve the funding.
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• Design for learning, not compliance. Ask what's being built, not what's been spent. Reward experimentation, collaboration, and compounding impact over time, not competition among partners.
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• Embrace the experimental. Not every technology will commercialize. Not every partnership will deepen. That's not failure. That's how innovation works. Fund portfolios, with breathing room, and focus on experimentation, not isolated quick wins.
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• Stay and listen. The most valuable thing a funder can do is keep showing up and listening. Consistency and listening build trust. Boom-and-bust erodes it.

The reframe

The value of your ecosystem isn't in the funding. It's in the place and the people.

The extra funding catalyzes some new experiments and ways of working. But the true value (relationships, trust, commitment to place) belongs to you. It existed before the grant. It'll exist after.

The ecosystems that thrive won't be the ones with the most money or the sharpest data. They are the ones that did the sensemaking together and made the strategy theirs. They understood, from the beginning, that they were building something meant to outlast the funding, the people, and the politics that brought them together.

You're not crazy. The system is misaligned.

But you're not powerless. You see what others don't. You're playing a longer game. The work you're doing matters, whether or not the current metrics can capture it.

Keep building anyway.

What's one thing you've built that would survive if the funding disappeared tomorrow?

Hit reply and tell us. We read every response.

Amy & Dawn
​Managing Partners & Co-Founders
Ecosystem Edge

P.S. If your region wants help collectively sensemaking what you've built we've booked out Spring and we're now scheduling Fall workshops. Reply to learn more.

Funding Opportunities for Ecosystem Builders

Here are several funding opportunities aligned with ecosystem-building work open now. We've successfully navigated foundation and federal grant development across multiple agencies, reach out if you'd like to explore these together.

• ​YouthBuild (Due Mar 2, 2026)
• ​EDA Disaster Recovery Supplemental FY 2025 (Due Mar 3, 2026)
• ​Next Gen STEM (NGS) NASA Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs (NAS_Hub) (Due Mar 20, 2026)
• ​FY25 ONR Office Of Naval Research (ONR) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics(STEM) Education and Workforce Program (Due Jun 30, 2026)
• ​Sloan Foundation​
• ​EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement: EPSCoR Research Incubators for STEM Excellence (E-RISE) (Due Aug 11, 2026)

Interesting Reads

These articles are worth reading:

• ​US science after a year of Trump​
• ​Federal innovation funding in 2026: What ecosystem builders need to know now​
• ​Statista and Time Magazine partner to highlight America's Top Incubators and Accelerators​

Our friend Kevin Carter wrote a book. Forget About Your Life Plan is a memoir about what happens when someone central to your life is suddenly gone. It intertwines friendship, startups, Baltimore, ecosystem building, grief, and moving forward toward a future that no longer exists. It's also funny.
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If you can support it, [pre-order here]. If you can't, sharing helps more than you'd think.