Entrepreneurship Ecosystems for All
The Emergent Field of Information Planning
This article is a part of the book: “How to Build University Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
This book has explored many founders’ stories at different moments in the entrepreneurship journey, from students like Annika who are unaware that what they are doing is entrepreneurship, to Liam who excelled in business competitions because of his advanced understanding of the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Each founder’s story revealed an information pattern of how people construct mental models of entrepreneurship based on their interaction with the ecosystem around them.
Understanding these information patterns, from the concept of achievable action maps to layered schemas, can help Community Information Designers (CIDs) better understand the mental processes at play within entrepreneurship and can lead to the development of more effective entrepreneurship ecosystems and to the better understanding of information ecosystems more broadly.
Increased Access to Entrepreneurship
All of the suggestions made in this book can be done with pen and paper, notecards and emails. This is intentional to decrease the administrative overhead needed to start taking action. Just like founders embrace rapid iteration, so too can the people that support them.
The practical suggestions provided are also intentionally inexpensive. Entrepreneurship is so connection driven, tactical, and ever changing that it remains inequitable for many. By making suggestions cheap enough that they are accessible to schools with both large and small endowments, the hope is that CIDs can increase the number of successful companies that come out of their schools.
Information as Infrastructure
The research conducted in this book does not need to stop with universities. Information patterns and the lens of information ecology can be used to understand how innovation occurs in a range of contexts, from corporations to cities.
Information patterns can also be used to analyze problems outside of entrepreneurship and innovation entirely. Studying flows of information within ecosystems is not typical because the positions of UX designer and information architect have largely evolved in private companies or organizations. This means their role is limited to the management and design of individual websites or apps. In the coming years as AI handles more of the pixel-level designs for designers there is an emerging opportunity for a role of “information planner” who intentionally crafts information ecosystems across different platforms. In fact, to tackle health inequality, food scarcity, homelessness, sustainability, and many of the other tough problems of our time it will likely demand looking to the wider information ecosystem people are immersed in.
Information is infrastructure, as impactful on people’s lives as roads, internet cable, and housing. Harder to see, and harder to analyze, but the creation of information patterns is one step closer to being able to do so. I hope in understanding entrepreneurship from the lens of information ecology and the development of these information patterns it can help create more places across the country, and perhaps the world, where all founders can get the support they need to thrive.
