Meet the ESHIP Alliance: New name for the national ecosystem building movement

Technical.ly

3 days ago

Andy Stoll has one t-shirt, loads of post-it notes and a new job that's a lot like his old job.
Stoll is the founding executive director of what is now called the ESHIP Alliance, a nonprofit startup that announced its new name last week in Indianapolis at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC). The GEC is a global conference organized by the Global Entrepreneurship Network (or GEN, which is lovingly pronounced like the name Jen by its many admirers).
Stoll made his announcement alongside GEN founder and CEO Jonathan Ortmans, and right before Right to Start's Victor Hwang, another entrepreneurship booster with his own big announcement.
They're just three of a constellation of groups that have spun off from the Kauffman Foundation 's decades-long investment in entrepreneurship. Last year, Kauffman announced plans to narrow its focus to economic opportunity in its hometown of Kansas City, winding down its national programming funding.
Stoll joked that his ESHIP Alliance could be the younger sister to GEC, which makes the Kauffman Foundation mom and dad, and Hwang a kind of attentive uncle — with plenty of cousins and lots of folksy Midwestern charm to go around.
Catching the ecosystem-building bug
Stoll was a local organizer in Iowa first, working on startups and gatherings in the early 2000s and 2010s. Hwang, once an influential Kauffman executive, gave Stoll the language to describe what he and thousands of others were doing.
'Victor told me: What you're doing is the future of place-based economic development,' Stoll said. 'And I said: I'm doing the what of what?'
In 2012, Hwang published ' The Rainforest,' a widely cited book on local economic development, and in 2017 hired Stoll. Together they produced Kauffman's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Building Playbook, which put institutional heft behind rag-tag community efforts flourishing around the country.
From 2017-2019, Stoll was emcee and organizer of annual Kauffman-backed ESHIP Summits. Hundreds came from around the country to discuss rebuilding their local economies from the ground up: some were there as part of their jobs, many others were not. But most talk fondly and passionately about being part of something that seemed overlooked then and is now taken more seriously.
Stoll and his team would stock up on colorful post-it notes, markers and engagement activities. As a 2023 Technical.ly report on the origins of inclusive entrepreneurship tracked, many grassroots efforts to reshape local economies took hold after the Great Recession and steadily grew during the 2010s. One of the most enduring is the 'entrepreneurial ecosystem building' that is sometimes called ' place-based economic development ' among industry insiders.
Their shared and primary push: state and local policymakers and civic leaders should put entrepreneurship at the center of their strategies for economic growth, opportunity and development.
Like scripture passages, these believers cite studies showing that new businesses create effectively all net new jobs, and that each 1% increase in entrepreneurship correlates with 2% declines in poverty. The ecosystem metaphor teaches that big institutions are vital, but must prioritize the many differently sized, aged and types of organizations that overlap to make an economy.
NRPs: National ecosystem resource providers
Stoll is friendly, chatty, and millennial nerd chic enough to be among the movement's leaders, backed by the influence and checkbook of the Kauffman Foundation.
Over a decade-plus, from an early Startup Champions summit to SXSW activations and beyond, I've seen Stoll at his most comfortable in a t-shirt, effusing folksy modesty while cracking self-effacing jokes and serving as a community historian of the work, preferably leading an exercise on collaboration with post-it notes.
Pushed out of the comfortable confines of the Kauffman Foundation, Stoll is now stitching together a coalition so this on-the-ground change can last. Among his partners is Black-entrepreneurship focused Forward Cities, which also got its start with Kauffman funding and has been long led by Stoll's years-long collaborator Fay Horwitt.
Together this week, they introduced the ESHIP Alliance's renewed focus to a network of so-called national ecosystem resource providers (NRPs) — organizations that address needs common to many ecosystems or state and local entrepreneurial communities.
'At its core, this alliance is about strengthening the profession of ecosystem building across the United States,' Stoll said in a GEC session. 'We need entrepreneurship, we need ecosystems, but we need to center equity so anyone, anywhere who wants to be an entrepreneur has the opportunity to participate.'
The alliance will gather these resource providers and help advance and formalize 'ecosystem building' as a discipline for state and local governments to embrace. Events, training material and policy positions will help. As part of that work the ESHIP Alliance launched the ESHIP Commons, a social network intended to help ecosystem builders connect, share ideas and find resources.
What's next for the ESHIP Alliance
Turns out Technically itself is an NRP, so I was at one of Stoll's tables at GEC — years since the last time I saw him in action.
On stage, he guided about a hundred NRP leaders through a series of exercises to identify the next set of challenges and potential solutions for ecosystem building. Much to attendee amusement, Stoll's presentation included a photo of him from years ago wearing the same 'Mass Collaboration' t-shirt he wore this week, signaling that while much has changed, many faces haven't.
Horrowit was up next with an exercise that cleverly required attendees to never reference funding as a problem. As she said, 'That's a problem for everyone, give us something new.' That let us focus on more specific obstacles to advance the work of centering entrepreneurship in local policymaking and economic development.
Good for an exercise, but what's next? Stoll, like this conversation, has graduated from the Kauffman nest (the group was initially called the Ecosystem Builders Leadership Network, so the rebrand gives it a fresh start). Entrepreneurship rates have surged post pandemic, led by women and people of color.
That's caught the attention of serious state and local leaders. Stoll, Hwang and so many others have for years advocated for a bigger stage, and now they have it. Stoll donned a dress shirt to get on the GEC main stage and announce his organization's new name. He seemed more at home the next day in his t-shirt, pushing all of us who support local entrepreneurship and innovation efforts across the country.
Said Stoll: 'We have who we need in the room.'