EcoMap Technologies, Inc.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership is one of the largest chambers in the country, serving nearly 12,000 member companies. Through its small business arm, the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE), GCP launched a Small Business Resource Hub powered by EcoMap Discover that includes more than 900 regional resources, organized by topic and by business type, and open to the entire business community. The hub isn't restricted to members, and that was deliberate. As Chad Hamman, Vice President of Membership and Product Development put it, GCP put the hub out there for the good of the ecosystem, not just for themselves. Resources are organized across categories like Access to Capital, Certifications, Coaching and Mentoring, Technical Assistance, and Cybersecurity, with curated pathways for Solopreneurs, Established Businesses, and Startups. After launch, the team built a dedicated tech collection on top of the hub, curating resources for companies looking to leverage AI and emerging technologies. That wasn't part of the original plan. It emerged because Discover's infrastructure gave them the flexibility to respond to new needs without starting over. The hub is available around the clock. As Chad said, "It's there at the hours that entrepreneurs do business, not just at the hours that the chamber of commerce does business." We published a full spotlight on GCP's approach and what they've built for Cleveland's business community here: https://lnkd.in/eJ-f7-HA #EconomicDevelopment #ChamberOfCommerce #SmallBusinessSupport

Supporting a small business takes more than funding. It takes technical assistance, wraparound services, and a clear way to measure whether any of it is working. Our next Ecosystem Talks webinar features Amber Ravenscroft, President and Founder of Bridging Innovation Institute and Director of the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, on what it takes to support the whole small business, from the resources organizations deploy on the ground to the frameworks that help ecosystem leaders track impact. 📊 Building a Support Ecosystem for Small Businesses: Technical Assistance, Wraparound Services, and Measuring Impact 📅 July 29 | 12:00 PM ET Moderated by Sherrod Davis, this session will cover: → What technical assistance and wraparound services look like in practice → How ecosystem leaders are measuring whether their support is working → Practical takeaways for SBDCs, chambers, accelerators, and community development organizations If you work in small business support, this conversation will give you a sharper lens on what holistic support can look like in your region. Register here, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording. Registration link: https://lnkd.in/eibxCZZk #EcosystemIntelligence #EconomicDevelopment #SmallBusinessSupport #EntrepreneurSupport

For years, the way most communities shared entrepreneur resources looked like a directory. A long list of organizations, maybe a mission statement, maybe a description of a few programs. Useful in theory, hard to act on. Matthew Lewis, VP of Partnership Strategy at GREATER MSP Partnership, described the old way: "Before EcoMap, you had to spend a lot of time, maybe even 20 or 30 or 40 coffees, trying to figure out what resources existed and who they were for. That time is a killer." When resources are organized by industry, stage, and what a founder is working through, that changes. Matt has watched it shift the conversation itself. "Once you start organizing things based on what industry you're in and how far along you are, people start asking the next level question. It advances the conversation." That shift gives time back to the people running programs, who are usually stretched thin, so they can focus on the entrepreneurs they're best equipped to help. If your team is still routing founders through a static list, we'd like to hear how it's working and where it breaks down.

Deal sizes have moved from the hundreds of millions to the tens of billions. The federal government is back in the deal-making business. And nearly every state is chasing the same handful of strategic sectors. Sherrod Davis sat down with Tim Sullivan, who led the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) for eight years, for a candid look at what's working and what isn't in state economic development right now. Tim shared four observations for state economic development leaders: 1️⃣ Be disciplined about what not to chase. If a project does not match your state's geography, talent base, or infrastructure, pursuing it aggressively wastes resources.  2️⃣ Lead with fundamentals, not incentives. Workforce capability, higher education pipelines, infrastructure, and quality of place are the foundation. Money is a tiebreaker. The Amazon HQ2 process is the cautionary tale. 3️⃣ Build the data capacity to look below top-line numbers. Unemployment rate is too coarse to drive strategy. Subsector trends, entrepreneurial activity, capital flows, and leading indicators are where the signal lives. 4️⃣ Pair data with narrative. A single company leaving for another state is a data point. Four or five is a trend. The data is what lets a state leader push through recency bias and tell stakeholders the right story. You can learn more and hear the full Ecosystem Talks discussion here: https://lnkd.in/eR2T59c2 #EconomicDevelopment #EcosystemIntelligence #StateLeadership

In most ecosystems the resources already exist. The problem is that entrepreneurs cannot find them. Patrick Fisher describes this in Pittsburgh as an awareness problem, not an offering problem, and Morgan Allen, MBA in Indiana hears the same frustration from founders who repeat their story over and over before anyone points them to the right resource. Contributing author Anika Horn spent the past year talking with builders across the country, and she pulls together what she heard. Relationships are still the foundation of this work, but the connections that hold an ecosystem together are mostly invisible, and they get harder to track as a community grows. A few of the patterns builders pointed to: → Fay Horwitt on spending less time on menial tasks so there is more time for the relationships that actually move ecosystems → Chris Heivly on distributed leadership that shares the load and keeps builders from burning out → Bill Romani on human-centered design, built and tested alongside the people who use it → Cameron R. Law on why measurement falls flat without a story funders and stakeholders can see This is why we think about technology as connective tissue. It handles the repetitive work so builders can spend their time on the relationships and decisions no software can make for them. Here is Anika's full article: https://lnkd.in/eHJdYrHw When support is hard to find in your ecosystem, is it a resource gap or an awareness gap? #EcosystemIntelligence #EconomicDevelopment #Entrepreneurship

Our latest Compass Series Q&A features Evan Kuo a Software Engineer at EcoMap who builds the tools that ecosystem leaders and entrepreneurs interact with every day. Recognized by Technical.ly as a 2024 RealList Engineer, Evan first joined EcoMap as a data engineering intern in 2023. He then spent nearly two years at A-Level Capital, a Johns Hopkins-affiliated venture capital firm, before returning to EcoMap full-time to help build our next-generation platform. In this conversation, Evan talks about: → What brought him back to EcoMap after working in venture capital → How the engineering team integrates AI into EcoMap's products → What it takes to keep things reliable while the product suite grows quickly → The technical challenges behind working with ecosystem data at scale Evan brings a rare combination of engineering skill, venture capital perspective, and a commitment to building products that help communities coordinate support and connect entrepreneurs to resources. Get to know Evan here: https://lnkd.in/eBbKu24r #EcosystemIntelligence #EconomicDevelopment #EcoMap

As the country marks 250 years, one idea still cuts across party lines, generations, and state borders. Most Americans believe entrepreneurship is central to the nation's future. Last year, Sherrod Davis wrote about this for the Business Journals. Right to Start found that 94% of Americans see entrepreneurship as crucial to where the country is headed, and that for every 1% increase in entrepreneurship, states see a 2% drop in poverty. Startups created roughly a quarter of all new jobs in 2023. Entrepreneurs drive revenue when resources are tight and accelerate growth when they aren't. Yet too many regions still run that support on outdated infrastructure, which means founders hit dead ends that slow down the benefits their companies bring home. A year later, this holds up. https://lnkd.in/eKC7kF7J 

Making ecosystem building tangible for entrepreneurs. Cameron R. Law, who leads the Carlson Center for Entrepreneurship at California State University-Sacramento, explores how visualization helps showcase the infrastructure and support for new ventures, making it easier to see and sell the value of our collective efforts. Cameron joined Fay Horwitt, Morgan Allen, MBA and Anika Horn to talk about the future of ecosystem building. Watch their conversation here: https://lnkd.in/eCn_juQg 

How do you do this work sustainably for yourselves to make sure you can keep showing up? Right to Start’s Morgan Allen, MBA tells about how she combats burnout. Morgan, Fay Horwitt, Cameron R. Law and Anika Horn sat down for an unscripted conversation about what the field is grappling with, from burnout to talking to policymakers in 2026 to which metrics ecosystem builders should stop claiming. Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/eCn_juQg 

Moving from hero leadership to distributed leadership with Fay Horwitt. Learn more from Fay, as well as Cameron R. Law, Morgan Allen, MBA, and Anika Horn here: https://lnkd.in/eCn_juQg