Information Architecture & Entrepreneurship

Building Patterns for Successful Startup Ecosystems

City skyline: https://www.pexels.com/photo/high-angle-view-of-cityscape-against-cloudy-sky-313782/

To all those who dream the world different,

And wake to build it.

Our lives are a collection of habitual patterns, from the routes we take to work, to the foods we choose to eat, to what we do for fun on the weekend. These patterns of how we understand and engage with the world impact the communities we build and how successful we are within them. While some people see Silicon Valley as a magical location where start-ups blossom, the magic of the Valley is not contained within its roads and sidewalks. The magic is stored in the habits, networks, and information maps of the people that together form a productive and supportive ecosystem for entrepreneurs.

This series of articles offers people who build entrepreneurial ecosystems that we will call Community Leaders, a set of interaction patterns to build the kinds of information networks in their communities that can foster successful companies. These patterns can be used in Silicon Valley as well as Kansas City.

Interaction patterns are repeatable flows of information and relationships between people and the spaces around them, an idea derived from Kevin Lynch’s “Image of the City” and Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”.

This book offers six practical interaction patterns developed through extensive interviews with entrepreneurs at several different stages of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan. Each pattern is broken into the information theory behind why the pattern produces productive interactions and the Practice to provide Community Leaders guidance to implement these patterns in their communities.

The goal of this book is to peel back the idea of Silicon Valley as having a hold on entrepreneurial success and uncover repeatable patterns to broaden equity of access to entrepreneurship.

Part I: Introduction

• Who Is This Book For?
• How This Book Came to Be
• Overview

Part II: The Landscape Now

• Patterns of Place: How Geography Shapes Entrepreneurial Information Networks
• Patterns of Digital Space: How Technology Shapes the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
• The Need for a Systematic Approach to Build Start-up Ecosystems

Part III: Interaction Patterns

• Interaction Patterns: A New Approach to Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
• Elements of Mental Maps

Part IV: Patterns In Practice

Peripheral Awareness: Putting Entrepreneurship on the Mental Map

• The Story of Annika
• Physical Design: Display Diverse Stories
• Programming: Breadcrumbs

Companies That Scale: Widening the Box of the Possible

• The Story of Umar
• Tool: The Collaborative Toolbox
• Programming: Startup & Studies

Narrowing the Unknown: Energy-Efficient Building

• The Story of Kieran
• Design: Create Multidisciplinary Collisions
• Tool: A Pack of Lenses for Entrepreneurs

Connected Goalposts: Address Leaks in the Pipeline

• The Stories of Peter and Melissa
• Tool: Connected Maps
• Programming: No Last Steps

Increments of Learning: Making Unseen Work Visible

• The Story of Melissa
• Physical Design: A Tactical Design Lab
• Digital Tools: The Startup Efficiency Index

Part IV: Lessons Learned

• Information Architecture: Towards a New Perspective of Design and Innovation for Digital and Physical Spaces
• Interaction Pattern-Based Building

Addendum

• Acknowledgements
• Works Cited
• Appendix: Research Questions