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The work that doesn't show up in the data
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"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. It's a gap in how the entire field has been built. We're at an interesting inflection point in ecosystem building right now. The field is finally catching up to something practitioners have known in their bones for years: building a regional innovation ecosystem is serious, sustained, professional work. It doesn't happen by committee. It doesn't happen after hours. It doesn't happen when the people doing it are under-resourced, under-recognized, and quietly burning out while funders measure event counts. But naming the problem is not the same as knowing where it lives in your region — or what to do about it on Monday morning. After working with 22 ecosystems across our pilot Scorecard sessions, mapping relationship networks across nine partner types and four phases of development, we can tell you: the failure modes are specific. They're measurable. And they show up in the same patterns almost everywhere. Here's what we found. What our Scorecard sessions have revealed.4 out of 5 ecosystems have a corporate engagement gap. Corporates appear on the partner list. They disappear from the partnership map. In nearly every ecosystem we've assessed, the pattern is the same: initial engagement at the surface, then a systematic drop-off at every subsequent phase — Discover, Galvanize, Emerge. Trade associations are even more stark. In most assessments, gaps across all four phases. Not developing. Not weak. Non-existent. This isn't a willingness problem. Corporates and ecosystem builders are operating in different languages, on different timescales, measuring different things. The organizational distance is real — and without deliberate bridge-building first, outreach doesn't convert. More introductions don't close that gap. Structural bridge-building does. This matters because corporates and trade associations are where market access lives. They're where founders find customers, where startups find credibility, where ecosystems find the private-sector anchor that makes everything else fundable. Without them, you're building in a vacuum. The ecosystems that appear the most active are often the most stuck. This is the finding that surprises people most. The ecosystems with the busiest event calendars. The most active Slack channels. The longest partner lists. They are often the ones most deeply frozen in the first two phases of partnership development — Engage and Discover. They are great at showing up. They are not yet Galvanizing. They are not yet Emerging. When we probe beneath this pattern, we find the same thing almost every time: partners can't give the same answer about what the ecosystem ultimately exists to accomplish. There's activity. There's goodwill. But there's no shared pull toward a common purpose — and without that, engagement stalls at the surface. People connect, then quietly disengage because there's no compelling reason to go deeper. If you asked your five most active partners what this ecosystem ultimately exists to accomplish — would they give roughly the same answer? In most ecosystems, they wouldn't. That invisible gap is what keeps Engage from ever becoming Galvanize. Funders are asking the wrong questions. And coalitions are optimized to answer them. Every funder conversation eventually circles back to the same metrics: How many events did you host? How many people attended your programs? How many patents did you generate? How many partners are on your list? None of that predicts ecosystem health. And here's the harder truth: ecosystems have become very good at producing exactly what funders measure. Not because builders are cynical — most are doing this work because they genuinely believe in it. But when the reporting requirements reward activity, you build for activity. When the grant cycle is two years, you build for two years. When no one is asking about relationship depth or partner breadth or what happens if this funding disappears tomorrow, you don't build infrastructure for those things. You build for what gets counted. The result is a field full of ecosystems that are grant-coalition-shaped rather than region-opportunity-shaped. Built around a funding source rather than a shared problem. Optimized for the funder's dashboard rather than the region's long-term capacity. This matters enormously right now. With federal programs constrained, state budgets under pressure, and philanthropy shifting priorities, the ecosystems that will keep moving are the ones whose relationship infrastructure was never dependent on any single funder to begin with. The ones where partners are showing up because of shared purpose, not because someone made a call. The ones where trust was built into the architecture, not just the calendar. Funders didn't create this problem on purpose. But the metrics they've required have shaped the ecosystems they're now frustrated by. That's not a character flaw — it's a system design problem. And it's fixable. But only if funders start asking different questions, and only if ecosystem builders architect the tools to answer them. In nearly every ecosystem we've assessed, the relationship infrastructure lives in one or two people. Their judgment. Their trust. Their institutional memory of which call to make, who to bring into the room, how to hold tension between partners who don't naturally trust each other. When that person burns out, moves on, or loses funding — and they do, because ecosystem builders are among the most under-resourced professionals in economic development — the relationships don't transfer. They evaporate. The architecture test asks a simple question: if your lead relationship-holder left tomorrow, what would still be standing? Not the programs — those can be rebuilt. The relationships. The trust. The shared understanding of what this ecosystem is trying to become. In most ecosystems, the honest answer is: not much. That's not a failure of the people doing the work. It's a failure of how the work is designed — and how it's funded. The ecosystems that keep moving through funding cuts, leadership transitions, and political headwinds have built one thing in common: relationships and systems that don't depend on any one person staying in the room, any one funder staying at the table, any one program surviving the next appropriations cycle. That's harder to measure than event counts or partner lists. But it's not impossible to see — if you know what you're looking for. The most consistent thing we hear from builders after a Scorecard session is some version of this: "I knew we were stuck. I didn't know where or why. Now I can see it clearly." Not because the Scorecard told them something new. Because it gave language to what they already knew but couldn't articulate. Because it made the invisible visible. The field is asking the right questions now. We think the next step isn't more frameworks — it's measurement infrastructure that makes relationship depth legible to the builders doing the work, and to the funders who need to understand what they're actually investing in. That's what we're building. And if the conversation feels timely for your region, we'd love to have it. Until next time, Amy & Dawn P.S. We've completely booked out Spring workshops and are now scheduling Fall. If your region wants help making its relationship infrastructure visible, and fundable, reply to learn more. 🎙️ New Podcast Episode: Signaling Scale Our co-founder, Dr. Amy Beaird, had a wonderful conversation with Aaron Taylor on his podcast Ecosystem, Scale! If you're someone who's ever felt like you're doing critical work that nobody can see or measure, this one's for you. We went deep on the concept of signals: not vanity metrics, but real evidence that your ecosystem is moving from transactional to collaborative, from reactive to strategic. We unpacked how the Ecosystem Edge Scorecard helps regions make that invisible infrastructure tangible, and why making the shift from ecosystem builder to ecosystem architect is one of the most important moves our field can make right now. One line from Aaron at the end of our conversation that we keep thinking about: "We need to stop assuming the ecosystem is operating as an ecosystem."
Truth-telling about gaps isn't failure, it's the foundation of everything.
Funding Opportunities for Ecosystem BuildersHere 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.
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Join readers of Ecosystem Edge for tips, strategies, and resources to launch, grow, and sustain your innovation ecosystem.
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