The blog
Field writing, by the team doing the work.
Reflections, strategy notes, and practical pieces from SourceLink practitioners.
No Wrong Door: How Scott Asmus Is Building Nebraska’s Entrepreneurial Navigation System.
Scott Asmus did not come to entrepreneurship with a traditional playbook. He came with an outsider’s eye, a deep belief in putting people first, and a determination to make Nebraska’s entrepreneurial ecosystem easier to navigate. Through SourceLink Nebraska, he is helping turn a maze of resources into a connected system built around real people, real needs, and real movement.
Read the post →
Uncategorized
No Wrong Door: How Scott Asmus Is Building Nebraska’s Entrepreneurial Navigation System
Scott Asmus did not come to entrepreneurship with a traditional playbook. He came with an outsider’s eye, a deep belief in putting people first, and a determination to make Nebraska’s entrepreneurial ecosystem easier to navigate. Through SourceLink Nebraska, he is helping turn a maze of resources into a connected system built around real people, real needs, and real movement.
Economic Development
Be Prepared So Your Community Can Count on You
Financial disruption, cyberattacks, and infrastructure failures require the same planning as natural disasters. Water rescues on a flooded Main Street. Sandbags and boarded up storefronts on a Gulf coastline. Merchants...
Funding & Resources
Beyond the Grant: How Entrepreneurship-led Ecosystem Builders Fund for Resilience
Many of us feel like we have been playing financial Jenga the last couple of years. When a federal grant is pulled here or a state allocation is pulled there,...
Entrepreneurship
Affiliate Summer Quarterly Conversation: Activating Untapped Entrepreneurial Potential in Your Community
Sometimes our most innovative entrepreneurs are people often overlooked and underestimated. They represent a stage of the entrepreneurial journey that happens before people identify themselves as entrepreneurs or appear in our ecosystem—before we have a name,...
Network news
How Maria Meyers Helped Shape Entrepreneurship-Led Economic Development
For more than two decades, Maria Meyers has helped shape the way communities think about entrepreneurship. Long before "entrepreneurship-led economic development" became an area of focus, Maria recognized that entrepreneurs needed more...
Network news
Getting Unstuck: Nebraska Entrepreneurship Dashboard Supports Economic Growth at City, County, and State Level
Five-year-old workforce data or, worse yet, costly, hard-to-access data became a stick wedged in the wheel of progress for early-stage company founders and civic planners in Nebraska. The 2024 Statewide Nebraska Quarterly Workforce Indicators Dashboard, a partnership between SourceLink and SourceLink Nebraska, addressed the challenge...
Economic Development
Building Momentum: 15 Years in the Making
Detroit’s recently launched MI Small Business Helper platform took years of persistent development to become a national model. Here’s what ecosystem builders can learn from their experience. Detroit is a...
Ecosystem Building
An Opportunity For Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Spend enough time around entrepreneurship, and you’ll eventually see this familiar graphic: It is a simple illustration that paints a realistic picture of the entrepreneurial journey that is full of twists, turns, ups, downs,...
Economic Development
A Turning Point for Economic Development: Entrepreneurship and Ecosystems
Economic Development Week is the right moment to name what is happening in our field and why those of us who champion entrepreneurship-led economic development need to speak up even...
Ecosystem Building
From Commitment to Convergence: What We Saw at InBIA 2026
At the start of this year, I made a commitment. Not to a metric or a milestone, but to a direction. I said we would be measured by what we...
Ecosystem Building
Infrastructure Is the Accomplishment: What the National Urban League Built
There are moments in a field when you can feel the strain, even if no one says it out loud. Organizations pull back. Priorities shift. Language softens. Work that once felt...
Economic Development
Beyond Celebration: Aligning Small Business and Economic Development Efforts
This year, The SBA's National Small Business Week and the International Economic Development Council's (IEDC) Economic Development Week land at the same time; the first week of May. That overlap...