Information Patterns for Successful Start-up Ecosystems
The magic of Silicon Valley is not contained within its roads and sidewalks. Rather it is stored in the schemas and information maps of its founders and their social networks that together form a supportive ecosystem for start-ups to start and grow.
This is a kind of magic that is hard to transport over the internet. For entrepreneurship cannot be fully learned by looking into its past. It is less a body of knowledge to know and more a mental process that shifts continually with the current economic and cultural ecosystems. What worked ten years or even ten months ago might not work in the present moment to create a successful company.
The goal of this book is to look at entrepreneurship through the lens of information ecology to understand how universities can better design their infrastructure and programming to foster productive information ecosystems where entrepreneurship can thrive.
This book is written for Community Information Designers (CIDs). CIDs are anyone at a university, city, or other community, that wants to improve the entrepreneurship ecosystems by changing how information is structured and shared in the spaces around them. CIDs in many ways are similar to urban planners, but whereas urban planners control the built environment, CIDs design for the often invisible information patterns that impact people’s thinking and actions. Information patterns are embedded in people’s social networks, the websites they use, and their mental models of how the world works.
But, if Community Information Designers can develop stronger entrepreneurial information ecosystems within their communities, hundreds more communities can capture Silicon Valley’s magic to become places where founders feel supported in building great, big things.
This book is broken down into six chapters, each of which centers around an information pattern vital for successful entrepreneurs. Each chapter is then broken down into theory and practice. The theory behind why each information pattern produces productive interactions for founders, and the practice to provide Community Information Designers guidance to implement these patterns into the design and programming of their communities.
Introduction
Part I: Information Patterns
- Entrepreneur As Information Gatherer
- Elements of Information Patterns
- How Geography Shapes Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
- How Technology Shapes Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
- Past the Lone Founder Myth: The Need for a Systematic Approach to Build Start-up Ecosystems a New Approach
Part II: Patterns In Practice
Foundational Selection: Putting Entrepreneurship on the Mental Map
- The Story of Annika
- Representation as Successful Evolutionary Path Indicator
- Changing The Risk-Reward Ratio of Entrepreneurship
Chosen Edges: Building Companies That Scale
Layers: Narrowing Unknown Unknowns
- The Story of Kieran
- Building Places for Multidisciplinary Collisions
- Lenses for Entrepreneurs: Building Out Your Knowledge Space
Nodes: Efficient Ecosystem Navigation
- The Divergent Stories of Peter and Liam
- Building Information Maps for Program Leaders: Shared Data, Aligned Goals
- Building Information Maps for Program Leaders: Resource Maps and Founder Journeys
- Building Information Maps between Programs and Students Part 2 — Complementarity
- Throughput and A Culture of No Last Steps
Effective Schemas: Entrepreneurship as a Loop
Part IV: Moving Forward
- Stronger Entrepreneurship Ecosystems for All
- Information As Infrastructure: The Emergent Field of Information Planning
