Beyond Collisions: How to build your entrepreneurial infrastructure (Changing the Economy). Este artículo no está disponible.Beyond Collisions: How to build your entrepreneurial infrastructure (Changing the Economy)

In communities across America, people are trying to support entrepreneurs. They know entrepreneurs add jobs, character and vitality to a community’s economy. Beyond Collisions gets behind the meetups, the accelerators and the hackathons to provide a guide for how to support entrepreneurs – how to build the entrepreneurial infrastructure. Entrepreneurship is poised to take its place alongside attraction and retention as a key economic development strategy. In traditional economic development, there is a defined process for the attraction and retention of companies. With entrepreneurship, there’s been no infrastructure, no roadmap. In most communities, efforts to support entrepreneurs are fragmented. Beyond Collisions provides a clear, proven path to building the entrepreneurial infrastructure that can enable people to start and grow thriving companies. It’s not one program, no silver bullet. It’s a process, a strategy to identify, connect and empower entrepreneurial support resources, and then measure the results. Maria Meyers, Kate Pope Hodel and the SourceLink team have been working in Kansas City and across the country for 15 years, listening, learning and leading. They join with others, the entrepreneurs of entrepreneurship, to share hard-earned lessons about how to build the kind of inclusive, supportive network that encourages entrepreneurship. Beyond Collisions explores key questions. Section One addresses why should a community support entrepreneurship, what an entrepreneurial infrastructure looks like and who benefits. Section Two provides practical, tactical steps to identify, connect, empower and measure the entrepreneurial infrastructure. Section Three outlines strategies around marketing, funding and leadership. Sprinkled throughout are stories from the field, firsthand accounts of building networks, encouraging entrepreneurs and analyzing outcomes.

A lot of people talk about building entrepreneurial ecosystems. Maria Meyers has not only envisioned it, she has implemented it. For Meyers, entrepreneurial ecosystems require big-picture thinking alongside on-the-ground expertise. From Seattle to San Juan, she’s helped communities across the nation build networks and collaborations to create regional roadmaps for entrepreneurial growth. In each community, her team helps identify entrepreneurial assets, connect them to entrepreneurs, measure their impact and fill gaps in the entrepreneurial infrastructure. She has been central in making Kansas City America’s most entrepreneurial city. Her untiring efforts have led to such innovative projects as KCSourceLink, Digital Sandbox KC, Whiteboard2Boardroom, the Urban Business Growth Initiative, ScaleUP KC and more … initiatives that are changing the face of Kansas City. At a higher level, Meyers is working on pivotal issues such as increasing capital for early-stage entrepreneurs, rallying diverse resources to work collaboratively to fill gaps in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and driving almost $15 million in federal, state and private funding to benefit Kansas City’s entrepreneurs. Meyers is frequently requested to keynote and facilitate discussions on topics like entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship economic development, and entrepreneurial infrastructure and ecosystem building for leading international organizations, including the Kauffman Foundation, International Economic Development Council, the International Business Innovation Association as well as regional economic development organizations and the Federal Reserve Bank. Kate Pope Hodel has successfully launched the SourceLink model and websites in many cities across the country. She has an extensive knowledge of entrepreneurship programs, dating from 25 years in the field. Hodel provides project management and operational support to SourceLink clients, with expertise in problem solving and data collection. Hodel was the first director of marketing for the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (part of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) and also served as director of Kansas City entrepreneurship initiatives for the Kauffman Foundation, joining the foundation in 1991. While at Kauffman, Kate was involved in the development of the SourceLink program.