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Entrepreneurship.
Field writing from SourceLink practitioners on Entrepreneurship.
Latest in Entrepreneurship
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.
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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.
Sep 17, 2026
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, an organization’s entire funding tower could end up on shaky ground, especially if it was the largest or sole source of funding. The question isn't...
Aug 03, 2026
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, an email address, or a business to support. According to Andrew Button, guest speaker at our June SourceLink Affiliate Quarterly Conversation, this "messy middle" contains more potential entrepreneurs than...
Jun 30, 2026
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 than individual programs or isolated resources. They needed connected systems. Communities needed shared infrastructure. Organizations needed better ways to collaborate. And entrepreneurs deserved to find the right...
Jun 26, 2026
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 of generating accurate real-time reports based on current entrepreneur-focused data. Data Disparity Local companies, innovation-driven startups, and entrepreneurs drive job creation and community-based growth. In fact, small businesses with fewer than...
Jun 25, 2026
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 city that’s shown it can take a punch. It’s also shown it can build something that lands. After years of building the foundation, pushing through...
May 28, 2026
Economic Development
Entrepreneurship Is More Than a Buzzword in Economic Development
The words communities use to describe entrepreneurs now shape who participates, who gets support, and how local economies grow. For a long time, economic development in the U.S. followed a familiar script: communities competed to attract large employers. Success was measured in metrics such as tax revenue increases, job growth, and square footage. Entrepreneurship existed in...
Dec 23, 2025
Economic Development
Santa Fe Small Business Navigator: Building Systems That Support Entrepreneurs at Scale
Across the field of economic development one truth stands out: supporting entrepreneurs requires more than good programs; it requires good systems. The city of Santa Fe has no shortage of entrepreneurial talent, committed partner organizations, or inspiring success stories. What’s harder is addressing the systemic side of the work. Becoming an entrepreneur depends on dozens...
Nov 25, 2025
Economic Development
Fueling Entrepreneurship in Rural America
Across small towns and wide-open regions, rural ecosystems grow faster when ecosystem partners invest in shared systems, transparent communication, and relationships that span towns and counties. Mark Burdette has spent more than two decades moving entrepreneurship forward in West Virginia, sometimes pushing, sometimes nudging. “Rural communities are kind of all I know,” he said. The deputy...
Nov 24, 2025
Economic Development
Ecosystem Unfiltered: Your Questions, Their Wisdom
Communities across the country are engaging in entrepreneurship-led economic development to give small businesses the best resources they need on their entrepreneurship journey. When trying to bridge gaps and solve problems, there is no “one size fits all” solution. When looking for strategies to bolster small business growth, it helps to look at those who...
Nov 21, 2025
Economic Development
How Data Becomes an Ecosystem’s Superpower
In Puerto Rico, new insights from ecosystem-wide data reveal who’s starting businesses, what drives their success, and how communities can respond faster when challenges hit. In resilient entrepreneurial ecosystems, data is the connective tissue. When it sits inside organizational silos, the picture is fragmented. But when it’s shared, analyzed, and acted on collaboratively, the entire...
Oct 29, 2025
Economic Development
Second Stage - Supporting the Types of Businesses in Your Ecosystem
This multi-part series offers ecosystem builders and economic developers insights into the characteristics of the four types of businesses in an entrepreneurial ecosystem—and targeted strategies that help those businesses thrive. Small businesses form the crux of the American economy. Recent data from the U.S. Small Business Administration shows the U.S. is home to 33.3 million...
May 30, 2025