How to Build University Start-up Ecosystems
Five Information Patterns for Success
The magic of Silicon Valley is not held within its roads and sidewalks. Rather it is stored in the relationships and 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, making it hard for other communities to copy it. For entrepreneurship, unlike many other disciplines, is less a defined body of knowledge to know and more a mental process. The actions needed for success in entrepreneurship shifts constantly with the current economic tide and cultural desires. What worked ten years or even ten months ago might not work in the present moment to create a successful company.
Many urban planning centered books on how to build entrepreneurship ecosystems will focus on years long, multi-million dollar solutions that might include clustering tech firms close to universities. Other individual oriented books focus on the founder and teaching them concepts from business plan generation, to the lean start-up approach, with the assumption that these concepts can work in any environment.
This book looks at entrepreneurship through the lens of a discipline called information ecology, which views the founder and the world around them as ever evolving and adapting in turn based on the information they know about the other. Through both structured interviews and naturalistic observation at the University of Michigan I have seen how different founders’ interactions with the school’s entrepreneurial ecosystem have impacted their success on their start-up journey. Through these observations six key information patterns emerged that I believe have an outsized impact on how founders navigate entrepreneurial ecosystems, and in their success within them.
Each chapter explores a specific pattern and is broken into theory and practice. The theory behind why each information pattern produces productive interactions for founders, and the practice to provide guidance to implement these patterns into the design and programming of start-up communities.
Understanding both the theory and practice of information patterns’ role in entrepreneurship can help more communities build coherent information ecosystems where founders thrive. I believe the magic of Silicon Valley can be understood and repeated to enable founders in small cities and colleges across the United States and the world be more supported in building big, incredible things.
Introduction
Part I: Understanding Information Patterns
- What are Information Patterns?
- Entrepreneur As Information Gatherer
- How Geography Shapes Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
- How Technology Shapes Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
- A Changing Landscape: The Need for an Ecological Approach Towards Building Start-ups
Part II: Patterns In Practice
Putting Entrepreneurship on the Mental Map: The Pattern of Attention Selection
- Annika the Inadvertent Founder
- Representation as Successful Evolutionary Path Indicator
- Changing The Risk-Reward Ratio of Entrepreneurship
Building Companies That Scale: The Pattern of Potential Achievable Action Maps
- Umar the Self-Constrained Founder
- Building a Collaborative Toolbox
- Work & Start Model
Narrowing Unknown Unknowns: The Pattern of Layered Schemas
- Kieran the Knowledge Gap Founder
- Building Places for Multidisciplinary Collaborations
- Lenses for Entrepreneurs: Expanding Your Knowledge Space
Efficient Ecosystem Navigation: The Pattern of Connected Nodes
- Peter the Disconnected Founder vs. Liam the Highly Connected Founder
- Shared Data, Aligned Goals
- Resource Maps and Founder Journeys
- No Last Steps
Process not Product: The Pattern of the Feedback Loop
- Melissa the Customer Expert Founder
- The Start-up as a Process
- Designing an Accelerator for Non-technical Entrepreneurs
Part IV: Moving Forward
- Stronger Entrepreneurship Ecosystems for All
- Information As Infrastructure: The Emergent Field of Information Planning
