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How does a community know its efforts to support local entrepreneurs are 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 use this data point as the primary indicator of “success”. Different metrics come into play at different stages of a community’s entrepreneurial ecosystem development, and it’s important to take a comprehensive, inclusive approach.
SourceLink offers reporting solutions for the entire lifecycle of your entrepreneurial support network. From identifying and connecting partners in an emerging network to tracking the accessibility and visibility of an established one, we can help you make data-driven decisions and showcase the value of your work.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program Director,
Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation
Many communities have an abundance of business development resources, but often entrepreneurs don’t know about them. SourceLink has developed robust technologies and methodologies that allow us to work with a community to quickly understand and assess regional assets available to the entrepreneur and make them available in a way that is accessible, actionable and trackable.
We believe that the best way to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem is to start with a Baseline report that uncovers what you have, then understand where you may fill gaps. Continuous improvement comes from reassessing and adapting the local network to meet the gap. Our asset maps and assessments always result in powerful recommendations for strategic data-driven decision making for next steps.
When it comes to jobs, the data often lags years behind, is inaccurate for small firms, and/or is not available in a geographic footprint useful for regional strategic decision making. SourceLink has pioneered processing QCEW and QWI datasets to make this existing and up to date data relevant for economic development leaders to interpret and understand what is going on with their entrepreneurial base.
We help communities quantify the impact of new and young firms to a region’s economy with a year-to-year comparison of job creation by new and young firms, wage growth and the industrial density of startups.
Community reporting – network level, macro level
figuring out the right mix of KPIs at the community level and translating it to what each organization can do to create systems-level change
Drive all the way down to reporting for an individual resource partner program
How emerging vs active, rural vs city, etc. can change the KPIs
Econ devs are focused on how to create more jobs, or what funders care about
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.
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.
Pioneering new ways of developing measures and capturing data – tee it up that it always lags, never includes small firms data, few consistent national data sets available for people to tap into.
Innovate ways to measure access, strength.
[email protected] | 844-804-8775
4747 TROOST AVE | Kansas City, MO 64110
