Launching our new blog with an update from EBLN's Executive Director on our collective efforts to advance the entrepreneurial ecosystem building field
“We are at a turning point in history. The exponential increase in connectivity and technology is ushering in a new economic era. As the Industrial Age comes to a close and a new economic system emerges, we face massive change and uncertainty. But there is also tremendous opportunity to reinvent our economy.” The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Building Playbook, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2017
For over 20 years, I’ve worked on building entrepreneurial ecosystems as a social entrepreneur. One of the most useful principles that I’ve learned is the “nestedness” of ecosystems—whether we’re referring to natural ecosystems, human ecosystems, or if you see those as one and the same (which they are).
Carol Sanford, a pioneer in living systems principles, defines nestedness as the idea that every whole exists within other wholes, such that changes at one level of the system affect all levels, and the potential at one level contributes to the potential of all. A simple way to visualize this is as a Russian nesting doll—each embedded within and connected to larger and smaller levels. Similarly, you are part of a neighborhood, within a town, a region, a country, and the world. Nestedness reminds us that patterns at one level repeat and often ripple through the entire system in all directions.
Right now, it seems, nearly every level of the systems I’m nested in is in major transition—my life, my work, our network, the economy, the U.S., and the world – at times, it’s overwhelming.
But transitions, like nestedness, are also a natural principle of life. All living systems go through cycles of birth, growth, decay, and renewal.
As the saying goes, “At all times, something is budding, something is blooming, and something is falling back to the earth.”
Understanding nestedness helps us navigate transitions, whether in entrepreneurial ecosystems, communities, or entire societies. It reminds us that “everything touches everything” — to understand change at one level, we must look (and work) across many levels of a system at once.
So, with nestedness and transitions in mind, I want to kick off EBLN’s new blog by exploring our progress through the lens of our nested systems—examining where we’re making strides, where challenges remain, and how the emerging EBLN network fits into the broader transitions shaping our world (and crowding our news cycles).
Our Civilization in Transition
One way to look at human civilization is that we have moved through four economic eras: hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, and now an emerging era that doesn’t yet have a name. I’ve heard it called the Information Age, the Knowledge Economy, Liquid Modernity, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Even without a name for our destination, it's clear that our civilization is in transition. The systems and values of the Industrial Age are being disrupted, primarily driven by exponential advances in technology and connectivity. These forces bring unprecedented innovation and opportunity and rising anxiety, inequality, and environmental challenges.
The forces we celebrate that make entrepreneurship more widely accessible are also disrupting many foundational aspects of society as we’ve known it.
Just as industrialization reshaped the world 150 years ago—shifting the U.S. from a rural to an urban nation and bringing both progress and upheaval—today’s disruptions demand new responses.
The rising societal disruption, poverty, pollution, and inequality of the late 1800s—often called the Gilded Age—gave rise to the Progressive Era in the U.S. During that time, civic leaders, social entrepreneurs, and regular people–just like you and I–created new programs, public policies, and societal practices that still shape our world today. Their efforts led to the New Deal, women’s suffrage, labor rights, new public health initiatives, civic clubs, mandatory high school, and civil rights movements, among others (see The Upswing).
Today, it is once again up to people like us to reimagine our communities and develop new programs, public policies, and societal practices that will help address the ills of the modern era and bring our communities together for mutual thriving.
I believe that entrepreneurial ecosystem building holds some of the answers.
Our Government In Transition
Many folks are already analyzing the chaotic transition to the new federal administration, and it’s too early to predict its impact on entrepreneurial ecosystem building, so I’ll steer clear of political punditry.
What is clear, however, is that despite political uncertainty, entrepreneurship remains a bipartisan issue and is gaining momentum. As Victor Hwang, founder of Right to Start, recently noted in Inc. Magazine:
“A quiet bipartisan movement is growing nationwide that is advancing entrepreneurship as a way to reduce a widespread sense of powerlessness and frustration among Americans who believe they are no longer in control of their economic futures.”
Seven state governments have recently established offices or directors for entrepreneurship as part of their economic development strategies, starting with the first Office of Entrepreneurship created in Nevada in 2023. Right To Start also reports that 60 bills inspired by their pro-entrepreneurial policy playbook have been introduced in 20 state legislatures.
The shift at the U.S. Federal level has been even more dramatic. Under the Biden-Harris administration, over $13 billion in grant funding tied to ecosystem building approaches has been earmarked for distribution in this decade through programs from the EDA, SBA, USDA, NSF, and elsewhere – though recent actions under the new administration have introduced much uncertainty.
Despite the shifting sands in 2025, it's good to remember that just five years ago, the role of entrepreneurship in economic development was still debated. That debate appears to be over. A bipartisan bill passed by Congress in December 2024 reauthorized the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) and, for the first time, prioritized entrepreneurship and innovation in its funding agenda.
Only time will tell how the current administration will impact ecosystem building, but the progress made at the Federal level over the past decade—once unimaginable—has been significant. Yet, clearly, there’s more work ahead.
Our Communities In Transition
COVID-19 accelerated existing societal shifts—the rise of remote work, online shopping, political polarization, inflation, housing costs, and income inequality—forcing many local leaders to rethink how we tend to our communities.
A new generation of leaders is reimagining civic institutions and grassroots efforts, tackling today’s challenges with fresh approaches –from new economic partnerships to innovative workforce programs to mutual aid efforts and new civic groups (e.g., 1 Million Cups). The transition to a new era is underway, and the pandemic accelerated that, too.
Over the past 20 years, entrepreneurial ecosystem building has emerged as one of those new approaches at the intersection of economic, community, and workforce development as a way to foster more innovative, collaborative, vibrant, and inclusive economies.
Last fall, the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) – the primary certifying body for economic developers – hosted an entrepreneurship and ecosystem building track at its annual conference for the first time in its 100-year history. That followed on the heels of IEDC launching a new entrepreneur-led economic development certification, a first-of-its-kind program and only the second individual certification IEDC offers.
Entrepreneurship and ecosystem building have never been more relevant to local communities. However, the practice still faces headwinds—the anti-DEI backlash, significant shifts in federal funding, and questions about how the work is sustainably organized, staffed, and funded.
As we move forward, we must also remember that ecosystem building is still new to many people. We must lead with grace, humility, and empathy as we introduce these practices into more communities.
Our Field In Transition
I was part of the group that founded the Startup Champions Network (SCN) in 2014— we called it “the first professional association for full-time ecosystem builders.” Back then, the idea that ecosystem building might become a respected profession seemed laughable to many. We hoped to find just 30 members. At SCN’s 2024 Fall Summit in Oakland, almost 200 people gathered, representing nearly every state.
In 2016, when I joined the Kauffman Foundation, we wondered if it’d be possible to find 400 early adopters of ecosystem building to take part in the first ESHIP Summit. Looking back, the insights from that Summit seem rudimentary compared to what we know today - but they were, at the time, quite revolutionary.
In 2018, just a handful of national ecosystem building conferences existed. By 2020, the Ecosystems Unite effort connected multiple events to reduce overlap. This spring, there are over a dozen conferences with ecosystem building programming – and that’s just in the first six months of the year!
Meanwhile, national ecosystem building resource providers (we call them NRPs) are growing their offerings and are finding new ways to collaborate to advance the practice — Forward Cities, SourceLink, GEN, InBIA, IEDC, SSTI, The National League of Cities, The National Main Street Center, Make Startups, The Black Innovation Alliance (BIA), The National Angel Capital Association (ACA), VentureWell, Network Kansas, and The NSF Builder Platform to name just a few.
While the Kauffman Foundation has recently changed leadership and moved towards other funding priorities, their investments over the last few decades to advance our field are bearing much fruit – including grants to help us launch EBLN. The Entrepreneurship Funders Network (EFN) began forming in 2016 and became a nonprofit in 2021, uniting over 50 philanthropic funders to support entrepreneurship and build equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems.
These developments signal real progress for our growing – but not yet fully mainstream – professional field.
While ecosystem building approaches have begun to enter mainstream thinking, there is a need to build greater consensus on the core aspects of the practice: better defining methodologies to build ecosystems, measuring impact, better funding models, and equipping more leaders with the necessary skills to be successful.
Our Network In Transition
The development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem building field over the past two decades has been significant and real, and just like ecosystem building in any community, progress is not linear nor the result of one organization or even a small group of individuals.
Growing a field is the result of millions of actions taken by thousands of people through conversations, collaborations, and interactions, big and small, over a long period of time. At first, most of these actions take place in isolation: a journal article here, an experiment in ecosystem building there, a new tool shared from wisdom gained by doing the work.
Over time, folks isolated on islands of their own have found each other, the connective tissue of the field has strengthened, and more visibility and consensus is building around the core “how to’s” of the ecosystem building practice.
As Victor Hwang once said to me, “In ecosystem building, everything moves slow before it moves fast.”
In just the last year, after decades of slow, sustained work by many people, it feels to me like the field has shifted into a higher gear. With that, the scale and momentum of the field is increasing in complexity, along with many of its challenges.
To meet this moment, we need even deeper collaboration, more opportunities to share knowledge and resources, and new platforms to connect and coordinate efforts.
The good news is that these needs were first articulated through conversations with ecosystem builders, and those who support them, at the Kauffman Foundation produced ESHIP Summits (2017-2020) and formalized into The 7 ESHIP Goals – our shared roadmap for advancing our field. Goal 4 calls out the need for a cross-sector coordinating and collaboration platform to drive collective action, shared leadership, and mutual accountability across the field.
After the formation of the ESHIP Goals, more than 300 contributors shaped the Ecosystem Building Leadership Project (EBLP) (2021–2023), a community-driven effort to co-create a plan for such a platform. In late 2023, with the election of a 13-person Leadership Council, we began the next phase of work to turn the co-created platform plan into action, setting out to launch a new nonprofit network called the Ecosystem Building Leadership Network (EBLN).
Last summer, I was hired by the Leadership Council as EBLN’s Founding Executive Director and first staff member.
What is EBLN?
EBLN is a national “network of networks” uniting entrepreneurial ecosystem builders and organizations supporting them to expand access to entrepreneurship nationwide.
Using an Impact Network approach, EBLN serves as a platform to connect individuals and partner organizations together to form a unified identity under a common set of goals – a place where everyone can contribute their resources and work collaboratively to develop solutions to shared challenges that none of us can solve alone.
Together, we accelerate solutions to The ESHIP Goals — advancing projects, programs, and tools that strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem building field in the United States.
Where We Are Now
Over the past year, we’ve established our nonprofit operations, built a shared governance structure, and refined our strategy. Just like the entrepreneurs we ultimately benefit, we’ve been talking with our “customers” (ecosystem builders and national ecosystem building resource providers…NRP’s) and our beneficiaries (entrepreneurs), getting feedback on minimum viable products (MVPs), and testing business models.
Like any startup, the early days are intense, but the energy around EBLN has been energizing. We’ve completed much of the foundational organizational work and are now ready to operationalize new projects and share more updates regularly with our growing community.
What’s Next?
This blog marks the first of four major EBLN projects launching in early 2025 to engage our community and invite deeper collaboration.
In a future post, I’ll introduce the other three forthcoming projects:
A digital community platform for ecosystem builders, replacing our MVP on Tradewing and built on Mighty Networks, to connect ecosystem builders and the many networks and organizations who support them.
A searchable map of the ecosystem building field, a visual directory of ecosystem builders and the organizations that provide funding, tools, programs, and resources.
A virtual speaker series featuring stories, resources, opportunities and promising practices emerging from across the field.
I’ll also share more about EBLN’s transition to a more refined governance structure, upcoming elections to add new voices to our Leadership Council and opportunities for more folks to get involved in growing our network.
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Life feels so full of uncertainty these days, but I remind myself regularly that it's all part of being in many simultaneous transitions towards a still emerging future. A future whose direction is shaped by regular people – just like you and I.
At all times, something is budding, something is blooming, and something is falling back to the earth. Old worlds are being composted, new worlds are emerging – and ecosystem builders are essential in helping us find our way.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy
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Andy Stoll is a serial social entrepreneur and currently serves as the Founding Executive Director of the Ecosystem Building Leadership Network (EBLN). He can be reached at hello@ebln.us.
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