SourceLink Affiliate Quarterly Conversation – December 18, 2025
It’s been our tradition to begin the final SourceLink Affiliate Quarterly Conversation of the year with director, Rob Williams, sharing his reflections from the past year and his hopes, inspirations and intentions for the coming year. Acknowledging the challenges and barriers 2025 brought to many of us, Rob also painted a picture of what he would like to do for SourceLink and the network in 2026.
Looking Forward to 2026
Our goal is to help reset what economic development can be—where people can shape their communities and find paths to upward mobility that entrepreneurship offers. To help reach that goal, we will focus on encouraging affiliate members to participate and take leadership roles in the international organizations and networks in our industry, such as IEDC (International Economic Development Council), InBIA (International Business Innovation Association), SSTI (State Science & Technology Institute), ESHIP Alliance, UEDA (University Economic Development Association) to continue building relationships and learn from other practitioners.
SourceLink will help uplift the services and people in the SourceLink Affiliate network in coordination with our national partners. Our first opportunity to do this in 2026 will be at InBIA’s Annual Conference in Chicago, IL April 12-15, 2026. SourceLink will be exhibiting and pulling together dedicated time for our affiliates to network. We invite you to become a member of InBIA and join us in Chicago.
In addition, we will be partnering with IEDC on their annual conference this fall and cohost a convening of those interested in entrepreneurship-led economic development October 25-28, 2026 in New Orleans, LA. Zachary Barker, IEDC Director of Entrepreneurship, joined our conversation to share his commitment to working with our network to make this happen. Director of Small Business Services at the Louisiana Economic Development and long-time statewide affiliate, Stephanie Hartman also joined our call to share her excitement at this collaboration and to welcome us to New Orleans. We are eager to be with our own Solomon Lee, SourceLink Project Manager, in his home state. Solomon promised to show us around and give our network the best advice on places to eat!
Andy Stoll and Fay Horwitt, key peer national leaders from the Eship Alliance, shared an exciting new opportunity for SourceLink affiliates to join their online community. The Eship Commons is a newly developed platform that will provide SourceLink affiliates with a dedicated online space to communicate with each other as well be part of a larger community of national ecosystem building practitioners. We will send more information in January with an invitation to join. This is also part of our commitment this coming year to better align our work with key national allies who are leading the charge for entrepreneurship economic development.
SourceLink Congratulations and Network Growth
We warmly welcome the Missouri University of Science and Technology to our network! SourceLink began working late last year with the University providing their team with a SourceLink Pro℠ CRM, asset mapping for the Rolla/Central Missouri region, and the creation of a SourceFinder™ poster (engaging visual representation of resources that serve entrepreneurs and business owners). This project was very unique, in that it was student-led and included a formal presentation to Jim Sterling, Vice Provost and Founding Dean of Kummer College of Innovation Entrepreneurship and Economic Development.
More Great News!
Our flagship shared CRM system SourceLink Enterprise℠ continues to grow! This past fall the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven and eighteen of their business support organization partners began utilizing SourceLink Enterprise for their shared data collection, client management, and impact tracking/reporting. SourceLink Enterprise is the first shared client relationship management software built by and for entrepreneurship-led economic developers and continues to set the standard for what collaboration through data sharing looks like in our space.
We love hearing from our affiliates! Early in 2026 we will send our yearly ‘pulse surveys’ so we can receive feedback regarding our services and products and to learn more about affiliate plans for 2026. We encourage affiliates to share best practices so we can feature them at our conversations, conferences and in our blogs.
SourceLink Technology Improvements and Updates
State and local governments are required by the Department of Justice to bring their websites up to ADA (American Disabilities Act) compliance in the next year, depending on the size of the population served. SourceLink is committed to complete accessibility for all our online platforms and is glad to provide personalized assistance to any affiliates using our accessibility analysis. Please contact us for assistance.
Thanks to our dedicated development team, we have some other very big news to share! In Q4 of 2025, we were able to realize triple-digit improvement in our technology platform’s speed and responsiveness. Plus, better usability enhancements and even two dozen new features were rolled out at the end of this last year. Check out our Q4 Release Notes for detailed updates on all the new updates and features available!
From Connection to Collaboration: Turning Ideas into Action through Structured Conversation
As those in our SourceLink network know, every thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem relies on data and infrastructure. But it’s the quality of the conversations built on data and infrastructure that fuel true collaboration. Our guest presenter for our final quarterly conversation of 2025 featured Jim Woodell, Ph.D. from Venn Collaborative. Jim led us through an interactive session to learn how intentional conversations with community leaders, stakeholders, and influencers serve to activate partnerships.
As Jim pointed out, structure can bring focus and clarity to a conversation and is helpful to make the conversation more actionable. Structure doesn’t necessarily constrain things; it creates a space for possibility and opportunity.
As we consider having important conversations with community stakeholders, we must first think about the variety of possible prospectives each of our partners in our ecosystem may have. What barriers, constraints and role do each one have? How can we lower the barrier, make the barrier more porous, and put in a door that’s easier to get through making collaboration easier?
Our interactive activity included breaking into small groups and role playing to work through a possible challenge our ecosystems may face such as, how to have stronger participation among ecosystem partners. Each person in the small group chose a role representing a stakeholder, i.e. university-based incubator leader, city economic development official, philanthropic funder, etc. and think about their perspective in this challenge. As we went into character and focused on their priority and constraint, we took a look where the perspectives aligned, paid attention to where perspectives didn’t align, and what made collaboration hard.
We were instructed to look for one concrete way to bring partners together in the next 12 months and advocated for what we believed was important. Then we tried to work towards an agreement to advance collaboration.
We found that it was important to understand the other person’s ideas, constraints and perspectives and collaborate on finding satisfactory solutions. Being honest about constraints helped many of us find win-win solutions. We all walked away with new lessons learned and tools we can use in our own communities.
About Jim Woodell
Jim Woodell, Ph.D. helps universities and community partners build stronger, more connected ecosystems for innovation and prosperity through his firm, Venn Collaborative. He is co-creator of C•CUBE—Conversations for Colleges and Universities in Building Ecosystems, a free online toolkit which equips ecosystem builders to use conversation as a tool for collaboration and change. Visit Venn Collaborative and download the free online tool 5 Steps to Ecosystem Building Success with C•CUBE. For more information contact Jim Woodell.
SourceLink Affiliate Quarterly Conversations
SourceLink Affiliate Quarterly Conversations and SourceLink Users Conversations are an exclusive benefit for members of the SourceLink network. Agendas include topics, national speakers, best practices, and inspired discussions for our community of ecosystem builders and is an opportunity for the SourceLink network to learn and grow together. For more information about becoming a SourceLink affiliate and to join our conversations, please contact Krista Markley, Director of Business Development, kmarkley@joinsourcelink.com.
