Measure your Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

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Measuring Progress

How does a community know its entrepreneurial ecosystem is headed in the right direction? What defines success – and how can it be measured?

It’s tempting to jump on the silver bullet metric: jobs, and want to measure this one metric immediately. But different metrics come into play at different stages of a community’s entrepreneurial development.

Measuring an Emerging Network

The first step in building an entrepreneurial ecosystem is to map the assets and connect them together. Metrics can be:

Number of network partners
Number of network partner meetings
Number of entrepreneurial events listed on central calendar

Measuring an Active Network

As partners begin to interact and know each other and promotion begins to draw people to a central hub, accessibility and visibility metrics begin to "count":

Network Access

web visits
hotline calls
directory searches

Network Strength

partners
calendar events
satisfaction survey results

Network Reach

friends and followers
sources of traffic

Measuring Collaboration and Network Leverage

A network becomes more effective as it engages, listens, responds and collaborates to solve problems and fill gaps within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Gap reports and entrepreneurial activity snapshots can demonstrate opportunities for collaboration that open resource capacity funding sources and increase jobs, starts, debt/equity infusion and sales increases.

Measuring the Ecosystem

With the right data, the right funding and the ear of the community, a well-established resource network can drive future economic development through targeted programming that nets dollars and jobs. Metrics including density, connectivity, financing, talent and growth can help a community decide where to put emphasis to build an entrepreneurial community.

Entrepreneurship Measurement Tools

SourceLink Client Relationship Management System

SourceLink Basic, SourceLink Pro, and SourceLink Enterprise (formerly Biz-Trakker®), is a comprehensive entrepreneurship client relationship management system, that allows you track, survey and showcase successes, so you can make fact-based program decisions—and share your impact with stakeholders.

Watch an overview video or signup for a demo.

Built-in Web Analytics for SiteConnex® and The Resource Navigator® Monitoring

A wealth of activity-related information is available via Google Analytics. We make using Google Analytics easy by integrating it directly into the back end of our platform. Data points include trends in the number of visitors, page views, entry and exit pages, top pages, length of stay, bounce rates, path analysis and much more. Reports regarding usage of the Resource Navigator provide further insight into business needs and demographics. Usage information can be exported into Excel for further data mining.

SourceLink Gap Analysis Reports

We have helped more than 40 regions map their assets and have been learning about, engaging with and developing entrepreneurial support organizations for more than 10 years. This puts us in the middle of data about regional resources. We can help you determine what's missing and make suggestions on how to fill the gaps.

SourceLink Capital Access Landscape Report

SourceLink has developed an efficient methodology to help you understand your capital access landscape. The goal is to provide a comprehensive picture of historical, current and emerging debt and equity investment. With such a broad view, clarifying gaps and highlighting action steps necessary to significantly increase debt and equity funding for regional businesses becomes easier.

This report gets under the covers of what may appear to be happening at the surface, looking at existing debt and equity investments, sources of funding for loan and equity pools and examining how well a community is accessing local, state and federal resources that can improve capital access.

SourceLink Entrepreneurial Community Dashboard Report

No exact science exists for measuring a community’s entrepreneurial health, yet much interest exists among communities regionally, nationally and globally in how to create an effective entrepreneurial ecosystem and measure the outcomes. SourceLink can help you measure your progress based on your objectives. Measures are based on key performance indicators, reflective of the overall components of a health entrepreneurial ecosystem. In addition to relevance, measures can include:

Entrepreneurial Density – Where young companies that are hiring clustered.
Capital – What is the amount of deal flow in the ecosystem, from what sources, how many companies are receiving financing and at what amounts.
Network Connectivity – How connected are the entrepreneurs and resource partners in a community; how connected are the support resources to each other.
High-Growth Firms – How many companies in the region are recognized as fast growers.
STEM Talent – What kind of talent is needed by area companies and what is the existing supply.

We can help you determine performance indicators, reflective of the overall components of a health entrepreneurial ecosystem based on relevance, availability of reliable data, ease of access to data and replicability over time.

SourceLink Best Practice, Measurement: National Urban League Monitors Business Growth

The mission of the National Urban League is to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. Their signature Entrepreneurship Center Program is a key initiative under the Urban League’s focus area of creating jobs.

Tracking outcomes is critical to the organization’s ability to tell its story of success. The National Urban League turned to SourceLink for help in coordinating the results from more than 14 regional offices in cities across the country. SourceLink Enterprise (formerly Biz-Trakker®) database provides the National Urban League consistent entrepreneur data for outcome reporting and activity tracking.

Interested in learning more? Reach out to Dara Macan and tell us what you are excited about in your community; we'd love to learn from your expertise and feature you as one of our forward-thinking leaders in our emerging industry.

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