How to Build University Start-up Ecosystems
Information Patterns for Success
As of 2024 the University of Michigan’s entrepreneurship program for the ninth year in a row was ranked in the Top 10 Globally by Princeton Review. U-M’s entrepreneurship undergraduate programs moved from fifth to fourth globally while at the graduate level, U-M’s programming was again ranked second in the world. The magic of the University of Michigan’s entrepreneurship programs to be able to develop successful companies even outside of Silicon Valley or New York is not contained within the university’s roads or the bricks of its Diag. Rather it is stored in intangible relationships and information networks that together form a supportive ecosystem for start-ups to form and grow.
This is a kind of magic that is hard to copy and transport to other locations because entrepreneurship, unlike many other disciplines, is less a defined body of knowledge and more a collaborative process between founder, their team, customers, mentors, suppliers, and investors. The actions needed for success in entrepreneurship shift constantly with changing economic tides and evolving cultural desires. What worked ten years or even ten months ago might not work now to create a successful company. The journey to success will also be different for each person based on their unique skills and background.
Many entrepreneurship books focus on teaching founders concepts such as business plan generation and the lean start-up approach and ignore the founder’s environment entirely. Meanwhile books on entrepreneurship program development tend to focus on years long, multi-million dollar solutions such as clustering tech firms close to universities and the development of university investment funds. While this infrastructure is certainly advantageous to founders, their cost makes them a non-starter for many smaller colleges and universities.
This book instead looks at entrepreneurship through the lens of information ecology which views the founder as ever evolving and adapting their mental structures and actions to the world around them. The key to entrepreneurial success within this paradigm is neither contained fully within the founder or within their environment, but the interplay between the two. Information patterns in this context are repeatable structures of how founders search for or interact with potential tools, co-founders, customers, and investors. Effective information patterns are those information structures that help founders find what they need with small outlays of time or money, which increases their chances of finding product market fit and ultimately running a successful business. This book is at its core an exploration for effective patterns.
This book was developed from both structured interviews and naturalistic observations between 2014 and 2017 at the University of Michigan to understand how founders’ mental structures evolved throughout their journey within the university’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. The goal of these observations was to uncover how the way in which information was structured for founders at the university impacted their success. Through these observations five effective information patterns emerged for students at different stages in the entrepreneurial process — from first time founders considering starting a company to experienced founders raising money. These patterns can help other universities provide more effective entrepreneurship programs outside of the traditional entrepreneurship support organizations of accelerators, incubators, and investment funds.
Each chapter is broken down into two parts: theory and practical application. The theory section looks at why a specific information structure produces more or less productive interactions between founders and their environment. The practical application section looks at how Community Information Designers (CIDs) can use this understanding of information structures to develop more coherent, thriving entrepreneurship ecosystems for their own schools.
The world is fundamentally better when many different kinds of people have a hand in building it. In understanding information ecology’s role in entrepreneurship and developing an information pattern toolkit to build more navigable entrepreneurial environments, I hope this book paves the way for more founders across the United States and the world to be better 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 and Liam, the Disconnected vs. 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 Non-technical Founder
- The Start-up as a Process
- Designing an Accelerator for Non-technical Entrepreneurs
