Advancing the
Entrepreneurship
Ecosystem Building Field of Practice

The Ecosystem Building Leadership Project

is an initiative to collaboratively design, create, and validate a formal entity or shared infrastructure whose purpose is to provide leadership for the advancement of the entrepreneurship ecosystem building field of practice. Past ESHIP Summits and other inputs have made clear the need for more coordinated and centralized efforts to build field-wide infrastructure that will help accelerate wider understanding and adoption of ecosystem building as a practice in economic, community, workforce and entrepreneurship development in the United States.

Background

Launched in 2017, the ESHIP Summit was a three-year initiative (2017-2020), designed to accelerate the adoption of ecosystem building as a new approach to entrepreneurship support and economic development. By bringing together builders of entrepreneurship ecosystems, the program was designed to take a community-driven approach to accelerate the emerging field of entrepreneurship ecosystem building. By working collaboratively across many organizations they aimed to create tools, resources, and knowledge to better support communities that are working to empower entrepreneurs.

This community of entrepreneurship ecosystem builders and the people who support them contributed to the development of The ESHIP Goals; a proposed set of collective objectives to further fortify the entrepreneurship ecosystem building field. The solutions to the ESHIP Goals are meant to serve as tenets to the field, and the goals themselves a checklist to help prioritize, organize, collaborate and create consensus, as we work together to improve the effectiveness of our emerging field as a whole, and as a result, the effectiveness of individual ecosystem builders everywhere.

Through this work to advance entrepreneurship ecosystem building as a practice, the need has been identified for a field-wide infrastructure (much of which is captured in the ESHIP Goals) that will centralize coordinated actions in service to the field. This will further accelerate wider understanding and adoption of ecosystem building as a practice in economic, community, workforce and entrepreneurship development in the United States. Thus, the Ecosystem Building Leadership Project launched.