This week, the WSJ Accelerators program is running a special discussion called Heartland USA. In it, they are exploring the development of startup communities in five cities:  Boulder, Colo.; Memphis, Tenn.; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Neb.; and Portland, Ore.

Monday is Boulder day and there are a number of guest contributions already up, including:

• Pete Sheinbaum (LinkSmart): Boulder: The Tech Industry’s Best-Kept Secret
• Carly Gloge (Ubooly): Communities Are Essential for Startup Growth
• Niel Robertson (Trada): Crowdsource Your Business, Any Time, Anywhere
• Chris Moody (Gnip): The Boulder Startup Scene: A Guiding Light
• David Cohen (TechStars): Boulder is for Startups
  

Today, at 3pm EST, I’ll be participating in on online discussion called Ask The Accelerators and with Scott Case (Startup America Partnership CEO) and Marc Nager (Startup Weekend CEO). Join us as we talk about how you can create a startup community anywhere in the world.

Guest Post By: Jeff Keen – Accelerate Okanagan (CEO)

I heard so much about the incredible Startup Community developing in Boulder that I decided to take a trip there to witness it firsthand.  Since my return, many people have asked about the trip, about Boulder and our experience.  For those of you who like to cook, you could draw a parallel of my Boulder visit to reading a cookbook versus taking a hands on cooking class from world class chefs. The intended results are the same but there is nothing quite like being there, witnessing how it’s done, and immersing yourself in the culture to truly appreciate and get the most from the experience.

During our visit, we had the opportunity to meet with many community leaders and learn about the evolution of Boulder as a Startup Community.  Everyone is actively involved and committed to making a difference.  We had 12 meetings in just over 2 days, each starting and ending the same way “how can I help?” and “is there anything else I can do to help or people you would like to meet?”  Awesome.

We participated in Meet-up events, Entrepreneurs Unplugged at CU Boulder and were invited to a small group dinner with community leaders and entrepreneurs.  We visited Techstars, were welcomed into several co-working spaces to hangout and catch-up on emails.  We were the beneficiary of many pay-it-forward introductions – no questions asked.  Entrepreneurs are everywhere in Boulder and the entrepreneurial energy is infectious. One afternoon at a local establishment, our server asked why we were in town and then proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes talking to us about her Startup.  Sidebar: Another great experience during our visit was the prevalence of “Happy Hour”. For a beer loving Canadian entrepreneur could Boulder be any more perfect?

If you read Brad Felds book “Startup Communities”, he talks about the Entrepreneurial eco system and the importance of it being led by entrepreneurs, the ”give before you get” attitude,  network versus hierarchical structure, inclusive of all who want to be involved and the necessity to be in it for the long term – 20 years from any point in time.  There are many other important discussions in the book, but these were my key impressions and our firsthand experience in Boulder.

The only negative about our Boulder visit was that it ended too soon. It was very inspiring and motivating to hang with people that are all working together to make a difference, led by entrepreneurs and supported by the community – everybody “all in”. Cool.

On the trip back, I was thinking about our experience in Boulder.  How could we tap into that culture, the infectious energy and continue to learn about successful Startup communities on a go forward basis?  The concept of the Entrepreneurial eco-system being a network not a hierarchy was resonating with me – the power is in the network.  Could we expand the network and get entrepreneurs connected to and from other regions? Perhaps we create a “Startup Communities Network”, a network of like minded entrepreneurs from other communities committed to the ”give before you get” culture – the impact could be very powerful; entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs through a boundless, non-regionalized support system, making the right connections at the right time, reducing risk and accelerating business growth.

Interested in discussing the “Startup Communities Network” concept in more detail?  I look forward to your feedback and getting connected.

A big shout out to Brad Feld and all the amazing people from Boulder for making us feel welcome and for sharing your time and experiences with us.  We are returning to the Okanagan with many great community building ideas to share and look forward to visiting Boulder again in the near future!

Related articles

• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Boulder Startup Community
• Asking The Right Question: How Can a City Create an Environment Where Startups Thrive?
• Two New Startup Books You Need to Read
• How Boulder Grew Into a Hub for Start-Ups
• Get on the Startup Map (by Ian Kuliasha)

Guest Post By: Namek Zu’bi – Silicon Badia (Founder & Managing Director)

I am grateful and consider myself very lucky to be able to experience, on a daily basis, two very different startup communities, separated by thousands of miles and an entire ocean. Being born and raised in a small but proud country in the Middle East (Jordan) and after spending some time working in Fintech, venture, and with startups in New York for several years, I was inspired by the thriving tech community in the Arab Middle East and decided to start a hybrid accelerator and venture capital platform along with some great partners to try to bridge entrepreneurs across both ecosystems.

We put our money where our mouth is and in less than one year, Silicon Badia has invested into and/or accelerated 12 tech startups (9 announced, 3 TBA) in Jordan and the US with an expectation to grow this family to ~15 companies by year end. We will only continue to accelerate and strengthen this platform as we work to launch a new early stage fund in Jordan with veteran Jordanian VCs and strong international sponsors. But this post is not about us – it is about what I believe to be a real threat to the startup community in Jordan and similar communities around us in the Middle East.

When people talk about a “Bubble”, they are usually referring to an “Economic bubble” “Speculative bubble” or “price bubble” all of which roughly mean the same thing: when the prices of products, assets, securities etc. rise very rapidly above their “true value” with little fundamental reason for this and keep doing this until prices eventually and suddenly go into freefall (the “bubble bursts”). Although, many would argue that some of the tech communities here in the US are “frothy” or in a “bubble,” and I have personally seen a few signs of this, the type of bubble we are currently experiencing in Jordan is one of an “Excitement Bubble”. In other words, what happens to a startup ecosystem when the excitement that has helped drive it fizzles and fades away?

What categorizes a community that might be at risk of an excitement bubble? Here are a few factors that I have seen in Jordan:

• High & Sudden Growth: Although Jordan has always had a strong technology ecosystem, the “new-wave” startup scene really only exploded 3-4 years ago especially with the (a) introduction of early stage accelerators like Oasis 500 (featured by Thomas Friedman here) who have done a great job of promoting startuphood and entrepreneurship to the masses (even over the radio!), with (b) the very important but over-talked-about success story of the home-grown Maktoob which was acquired by Yahoo in 2009, and with (c) the continued support of the “godfather investors” of the industry like Accelerator Technology Holdings (and its early stage IV Holdings) and Fadi Ghandour’s group. Were we ready for such a high and sudden growth?
• Cultural Barriers: A community where necessary startup cultural traits that help ensure sustainability over the long-run do not come natural in society such as risk-taking or overcoming failure (society taboos of failure). Although we have managed to somewhat overcome the first step of “Why don’t you work with your father or at Bank X” mentality to some degree, I feel that the majority of society is only testing the startup community and waiting for a few more failures only to say “See I told you this won’t work… now go back to your father or Bank X and stop wasting time”
• Unrealistic Expectations: Do young and first-time entrepreneurs realize how hard the advertised “join accelerator => raise seed funding => raise more funding => sell for millions” cycle usually is? From recent conversations over the past two years, I fear that many don’t.
• Angel investors: Just as society is “testing” this newly formed startup community, angel investors who are extremely important to the viability of the ecosystem but who have traditionally made their fortune through real estate or industry (and rarely through their own tech startups or investing in them) are also testing the community without truly understanding the risks of angel investing and realizing the cold-hard fact that a high % of early stage ventures fail (i.e. you will most-likely loose your money!). Do they have a strong enough stomach to take the hit given what I fear will be a large wave of early-stage failures that we will see in the region over the next years?
• The “black hole” of early stage investing: I borrow this phrase from my friend and Chairman of Oasis 500 Dr. Usama Fayyad who says that we have a “black hole” in the early stage investing….he is 100% right. The amount of investment capital available to satisfy the demand for it in the seed stage and the early stage/Series A (arguably similar here in the US) is a black hole. It will be especially interesting to see how this unfolds in the next year as many of the tech “darlings” in the ecosystem go for their first real Series A raise. Nevertheless, we are hoping that with funds like ours, Sadara, Wamda, MEVP, Dash etc. and capital from abroad (as shown by the recent fundraising rounds of Souq and MarkaVIP) will fill this gap but this is happening slowly. The natural question many will ask here is “Wait…I thought you guys have tons of $ in the Middle East from oil??” True we do, but that is only concentrated among a few countries who would rather spend that money buying football teams in England or buying luxurious businesses than on building a sustainable SME industry that can help build the future of the region.
• Macro-politics: I leave this for last but this is something we simply can’t ignore. What happens when the same visionaries at power who had a large hand in creating an IT services economy are now pressured by other forces to turn their backs against some of core values of the internet ecosystem. Remember SOPA/PIPA? This Bloomberg article does a good job explaining this.

Despite all of these factors all hope is not lost (obviously otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this). We smell opportunity. It will require creativity, it will necessitate competition, it will rely on support from and the integration with other communities, and it will require the few entrepreneurs and investors that will succeed in these next years to continue to motivate the younger generations of entrepreneurs (and hopefully invest back with capital and their new gained knowledge/experience). We are hoping to create a sustainable ecosystem as we need it in our region.

Kind Regards,

Namek T. Zu’bi
http://www.siliconbadia.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/namekzubi
@namekz

On Thursday 12/13 I’ll be doing an event in LA around Startup Communities. It’s being hosted by Cross Campus and is happening at their facility from 7pm – 9pm (PST).

Cross Campus
820 Santa Monica Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90401

You can register and sign up here.

See you in LA!

Wow – I was blown away by the great sketch notes on my Startup Communities talk that Sacha Chua made from my talk in Toronto a few weeks ago.

Sacha completely captured it.

I got a note the other day from my friend Lesa Mitchell concerning my assertion that you can create startup communities anywhere in the world. Lesa is vice president of Innovation and Networks at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Her responsibilities include identification of programmatic and policy levers that can accelerate innovation and support networks enabling firm growth. I asked her if she could write a quick summary of the experience she had with a handful of Yemen business leaders – it follows.

Recently at the Kauffman Foundation we hosted the US Ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, and a group of ten business leaders from Yemen. At the Kauffman Foundation we host 80K visitors a year from all over the world who are either using our facilities for meetings around the topics of education, innovation or entrepreneurship or, are coming to the Foundation specifically to acquire knowledge to replicate in their own communities.

I used this opportunity to talk about Mr. Kauffman’s history as an entrepreneur and mentor which led to the creation of the Kauffman Foundation and how we are using Brad Feld’s “entrepreneurial stack” to translate those lessons to communities around the world. I heard from the entrepreneurs that they wanted to lead, wanted to help other entrepreneurs and would like their government to be supportive but not in the way. I told them that any entrepreneur in the USA would have repeated the exact same message. I heard from Mr. Fathi Hayel Saeed that he was enjoying the sense of community of the entrepreneurs on their trip and was interested in supporting other entrepreneurs when he returned home. Do they want Startup Weekends in Sana’a Yemen – yes. Do they love the idea of running competitions to allow some of their young people to get interested in entrepreneurship – yes.

The lesson; startup communities can start and flourish anywhere in the world. They all need to figure out their own “stack” based on the resources available in their community and they all agree on one thing – entrepreneurs by growing their firms, creating jobs with good wages and helping other entrepreneurs can actually improve the economy.

Related articles

• The Kauffman Foundation Unveils Its First-Ever Super Bowl PSA Honoring and Inspiring Entrepreneurs
• Kauffman Foundation Commits $500,000 to Astia to Advance Women’s Participation in High-Growth Entrepreneurship
• Nearly Half of Innovative U.S. Startups Are Founded by ‘User Entrepreneurs,’ According to Kauffman Foundation Study
• Kauffman Foundation Announces Grant to ITEN

I recently received an email from Chris Heivly and Dave Neal who recently  spent an hour talking about the Boulder Thesis and what it means for them in RTP/Triangle/Raleigh-Durham. I’ve gotten to know Chris and Dave through a few trips in the past to Durham along with their work at Triangle StartUp Factory, the accelerator they run in Durham. They offered an example of how a feeder – the Durham Chamber of Commerce – has effectively engaged and supported the Durham startup community. The example follows:

When you talk about the role of governments, institutions, and associations as feeders I felt like I wanted some more examples.  We have a very unique Chamber of Commerce here in Durham and I think they serve as a good example.

When I first started talking to you and David Cohen in the fall of 2009 about an accelerator here in Durham – you planted the entrepreneur-led, organic/network thesis in my head.  I was on a 275 person in a year tour of the area testing the accelerator thesis and one of those meetings was with the head of the Durham Chamber, Casey Steinbacher and a young associate, Adam Klein.  They asked to get involved and I pushed hard on the “you can’t control this – you need to support this” thesis.  We gave them a task – raise awareness. They bought it big time.  They reached out to the entrepreneurial community for thoughts, advice, help and then took off.  If anyone would have told me that I would be working with a Chamber of Commerce I would have told them they were crazy.  They are true partners in our ecosystem today.

To date, they have spearheaded two contributing efforts that have really helped support & grow the region:

1. The first was the Durham Stampede, an application based program which offered 60 days of free space in a cool downtown location for 10-15 startup (mostly around software tech).  I and others supported their effort by being one of about 8-10 experienced entrepreneurs who came in to share our best practices and get these founders networked.  The goal – simple – raise awareness of the scene in Durham.  They have operated 3 programs in the past 18 months.
2. Their 2nd offering was called the SMOffice - the world’s smallest office.  An application based offering that provided free office space (80 sq feet) in the corner of the coffee shop that is the equivalent of “Buck’s” in Durham.  The winning team got the space for 6 months as well as a free condo.  3 sisters from Illinois with Durham roots were selected (they are building an Etsy for just NC based artisans).

Total costs run less than $5k per Stampede session and most everything was donated for the SMOffice.  I find these efforts to be totally supportive of the greater good and consistent with their strengths.

I was in Montreal yesterday hanging out at Founder Fuel and doing a bunch of stuff with Montreal entrepreneurs. One of them, Alistair Croll, sent me an overview from his perspective of what’s going on. It’s reposted here – if you are from Montreal please feel free to add to it in the comments!

In the past few years, the Montreal tech scene flourished. There are plenty of reasons for this—some cultural, some economic, and some the result of hard work by a dedicated core that wants to grow the community. Whatever the case, things are changing fast, with the city pumping out new startups and launching big tech events at a breakneck pace.

Montreal’s a goldilocks city—big enough to have culture and chaos, and small enough that you can actually find it. I’ve lived and worked in a number of tech centers, and for me, the blend of art, tech, and lifestyle makes Montreal feels more like San Francisco than any other city I know.

Geography and infrastructure

Montreal is a city of around 3.8 million people, located on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence river. Throughout its history, it’s been a gateway. Jacques Cartier first visited the city in the 1500s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal), and for centuries it was the doorway to the Great Lakes and the center of the continent. Today, however, it’s a different kind of gateway—for technology and design.

Montreal’s had a tech scene for decades. Canada has one of the most lucrative telecommunications markets, and Nortel built big research facilities in Montreal.

It’s only in the last decade that Montreal’s startup communities have really flourished. Some successful exits, a more risk-tolerant investor community, a range of tech events, and an increased emphasis on design have all helped propel the area to the forefront of Canadian tech innovation.

Today, Montreal ranks just behind San Francisco for its concentration of high tech jobs. (http://www.montrealinternational.com/innovation-high-technology-high-technology-jobs/) Its multilingual culture attracts many European firms looking for a North American footprint. And thanks to generous tax incentives, launching a tech company here is cheap: a 2011 KPMG study of business operating costs ranked the city substantially cheaper than other tech centers in North America. (http://www.montrealinternational.com/costs-business-overall-operating-costs/.) For some companies, government-backed R&D tax credits can pay for as much as 80% of salaries. (http://www.montrealinternational.com/taxation-incentives-corporate-financing/)

It takes a community

In my opinion, while these are great for growing businesses, what really matters is the community that supports new companies. In the Bay Area, the whole city is a tech community; it’s only after having spent time there that you realize the need to actively create that environment elsewhere. That takes events, investors, accelerator programs, and access to talent.

Montreal has two big blogs devoted to local technology. Next Montreal (http://nextmontreal.com), started by Ben Yoskovitz (http://www.instigatorblog) keeps track of tech happenings and companies in the city. Meanwhile, Montreal Tech Watch (http://montrealtechwatch.com/)—powered by Heri Rakotomalala (http://montrealtechwatch.com/), Gabriel Sundaram, and others—focuses more on tech events like hackathons. VC-TV (http://venturecaptv.com/) publishes a lot of video content on local tech events, and Startupnorth (http://startupnorth.ca/) covers the entire spectrum of Canadian tech.

The city has a number of co-working spaces, including Station C, Notman House (http://notman.org/en/) (backed by Real Ventures), Station C (http://station-c.com/), ECTO (http://www.ecto.coop), Nexus Montreal (http://www.nexusmontreal.com/en/Home) Execo (http://www.exeko.org/en/espace/), and the RPM Co-working space (http://www.rpmmtl.com/) where Year One Labs was located. There’s also a vibrant “térasse culture” here: in the winter we code and hibernate, and in the summer we hustle and celebrate. Solid public transit systems (including on-demand bikes!) and affordable rent make it easy to start a company for relatively little up-front investment. If you want more details, check out this recent Quora thread on living here (http://www.quora.com/Montr%C3%A9al-QC/Whats-it-like-to-live-in-Montreal-vs-other-major-cities-NYC-Paris-London-Toronto-Sydney-Singapore-Hong-Kong).

The city is also host to a variety of tech events. We launched the International Startup Festival (http://www.startupfestival.com/en/) last summer, welcoming startups from 12 countries and over 1,400 attendees. The community is relatively tight-knit, holding an annual holiday bash for startups (http://www.technoel.ca/home.cfm), tech events like Ignite and Bitnorth, and a number of monthly tech meetups, most notably the Montreal Newtech meetup (http://mtlnewtech.tumblr.com/), the Montreal Girl Geeks events (http://montrealgirlgeeks.com/), and Startupcamp (http://scmtl7.wikidot.com/).

Investment climate

About that investment: Canadian investors have traditionally been very risk-averse. When we sought funding for Coradiant’s series A, we didn’t even bother talking to domestic investors, choosing instead to look to Boston and San Francisco. That’s quickly changing, with the folks at Real Ventures (http://realventures.com/en/) pushing the envelope and others not far behind. Real has a superb accelerator program, called Founderfuel (http://founderfuel.com/en/), that takes in roughly ten new startups each semester and pumps out world-class startups.

I was a part of a one-time angel-backed accelerator called Year One Labs that launched three growing companies in around six months, and other VC firms are following suit with their own investment. There’s also a fairly active angel network, Anges Québec (http://www.angesquebec.com/) Today, the VCs active in the tech scene include Real, iNovia (http://inoviacapital.com/), Rho Ventures (http://www.rho.com/), Novacap (http://www.novacap.ca/), and Tandemlaunch (http://www.tandemlaunchtech.com/).

Investors aren’t just focused on web technology. Stephane Ouaknine’s (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=1349426) Inerjys (http://inerjys.com/) backs cleantech companies; Teralys (http://www.teralyscapital.com/home) backs not only tech, but also green and life science startups. Finally, in addition to government programs like tax credits, the Business Development Bank of Canada (http://www.bdc.ca/en/Pages/home.aspx) (BDC) backs new ventures with financing, though their mandate extends to all kinds of companies, not just high tech. The FTQ(http://www.fondsftq.com/en/accueil.aspx)—the investment arm of a pension fund—and Desjardins (http://www.desjardins.com/en/entreprises/solutions/financement/capital-developpement/index.jsp), a big Quebec co-op bank, also invest from time to time, but are into later stage companies.

Success stories

Every city needs success stories to rally around. Transportation giant Bombardier is based here; consulting behemoth CGI is from Montreal; and the province of Québec is a net producer of hydroelectric energy thanks to vast dams in its northern regions, so there’s definitely some corporate backing for engineering and technology in general. Social media heavyweight Mitch Joel’s Twistimage (http://www.twistimage.com/en) is one of the big marketing organizations in the city, and there are a number of other prominent creative agencies here.

Montreal’s always been known for its design and art culture (this is where Cirque Du Soleil comes up with all those crazy ideas, after all) and the summers are host to the world’s biggest fireworks, jazz, and comedy festivals. This may explain why tech firms like Discrete Logic and Softimage were early local successes. Other recent movers and shakers include Matrox, CAE, Poly9, Coradiant, HyperTec, and Tungle.

Talent

Finally, there’s the talent question. Montreal has a lot of it. It’s home to a number of prominent universities and technical colleges. Increasingly, however, it takes more than a geek to launch a startup. As Dave McClure wisely observed (http://www.pushkarsane.com/enterprise/startup-hacker-hustler-designer/), a startup today takes not only a hacker and a hustler, but also a designer. Human factors are key to winning over a fickle audience with high expectations. Montreal’s design and art culture helps with this, and we’re home to many designers like Daniel Arsenault (http://www.leportfolio.com/) and Sonia Gaballa (http://nudgedesign.ca/) who’ve worked on huge websites, popular themes, and household brands.

It’s been great to watch the tech scene here unfold. I’m sure I’ve left a ton of worthwhile people, projects, investors and companies out of this list, but hopefully it’s a decent place to get started. The city has a ton to offer, and there’s a real sense developing that we have some distinct advantages over other cities in terms of talent, culture, investment, and infrastructure.

Full disclosure: I have my hands in a lot of things in Montreal. I’m a founding partner of Year One Labs and a mentor at Founderfuel; I co-founded Coradiant; I’m the content chair of the International Startup Festival; I’m part of the team at CloudOps and the RPM co-working space; and I founded the Bitnorth conference. So I may be biased; and I probably overlooked many of the awesome things going on in the city. Feel free to correct that in the comments.

This is a guest post from Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software and CEO of Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO). Ryan wrote the story of EFCO for Startup Communities and he asked if he could add to his section via a guest post with some new thoughts he had. They follow.

Not only did I have the gift of reading an advanced copy of Startup Communities, I also had the gift of getting to know Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor when they moved to Boulder back in the mid-1990’s.   It was coincidental that I was moving back to Boulder at the same time. After going to school at CU, I had left to try opportunities in Bozeman and Denver.

I agree with Brad, the Boulder Startup Community seeds were planted by leadership back in the mid-1990’s.   However, NOT enough has not been said about Brad’s leadership role.

As folks who were working in technology back then, it was an exciting time.  My business partner (and now Rally CEO), Tim Miller, and I used to say that we were just trying to hold on to the tail of the giant monstrous force called the Internet.  Tim was fond of saying,  “Sometime we even got to grab on to the collar of the beast and see where it was headed.”  When Brad rolled into town in his early 30’s, I literally saw him as an extension of that Internet beast.

Brad did not just bring his energy, experience and vision; he and Amy brought their entire selves to the game.  They came ready to share, to laugh and to be self-effacing.   Starting the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, now EO, was critical.  In that step, Brad showed how to be a servant leader.   He had no problem serving by leading, but now his stewardship of YEO showed how to lead by serving.  He helped many of us invest in ourselves and thus invest in our rapidly growing community.  This was one of many gifts that Brad and Amy gave to this community over the past 15 years.

Roll the clock forward 15 years and let’s look at Brad’s partnership, Foundry Group’s, latest example of Servant Leadership.

In 2010, the Foundry Group set aside a portion of their “carry” to the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado (EFCO) and this summer, they broke into their carry.  As a result, they were part of almost $500,000 of community endowment flowing through the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado and into the Boulder/Denver community.   As a result of Foundry Group’s partners committing to this program, EFCO can see more income coming over the remaining life of the first Foundry fund.  This gift has allowed EFCO to hire an executive director, Morgan Rogers, and have EFCO become an active part of growing the Denver, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs’ startup communities.

This was not Brad or Foundry Group’s first impact on EFCO.  If you read my EFCO chapter in Startup Communities, you will hear about Brad’s help in founding and pivoting my work on EFCO.  Also know that Seth Levine, from Foundry, has been an invaluable member of the EFCO board for the last five years as we have grown.

Many people think that Boulder’s Startup Community is so great because of Brad.  I believe that to be true, but not in the way you think.  It was not his personal or investment money that built this community; it was his servant leadership that is causing this to be such a great startup community.

The great thing for you and your community is that the book is true.  You can create a great startup community by following the 10 principles outlined in the book and you don’t need Brad — you just need some great servant leaders to help the other entrepreneurs work for the long game.

Luckily all entrepreneurs, like you, are natural leaders because of your drive to inherently make things better and committed to turning your vision into reality.  By keeping your eyes focused on the long-term outcomes, not just the short-term outputs, you can provide the servant leadership to create a great community — not just a great startup community — a great company and a great personal life.

This past weekend, seven teams from regions across the world met in Edinburgh, Scotland to continue on a two-year journey to develop strategies and implement plans to build startup communities in their regions. Delegations from Scotland, Finland, Hangzhou (China), Turkey, Andalucia (Spain), and Veracruz (Mexico) were all taking part in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP) organized and run by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

The teams were led through this three-day workshop by MIT Sloan faculty whose research has contributed significantly to the academic understanding of the drivers and impact of innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystems and startup communities. The program originated as a response to frequent requests of faculty to give brief talks on the subject and consult to regions around the globe; the desire to take a deeper look at how to better examine and accelerate these entrepreneurial ecosystems and a commitment to driving towards impact resulted in the MIT REAP program.  They formed MIT REAP as part of an comprehensive effort to engage all stakeholders in a regional strategy, putting their research into practice.

One part of the MIT REAP curriculum is to assemble a task force of key players across the ecosystem to form a strong and defensible strategy for building an entrepreneurial community within a given region. Having a strategy for your community follows from the findings from Professors Scott Stern and Fiona Murray who have dedicated their careers to studying entrepreneurship and innovation. This past week in Edinburgh, MIT REAP members were able to closely examine one cluster emerging in Scotland by touring sites across the wave energy ecosystem. In addition to hosting many leading wave energy companies born out of Scottish universities, including Pelamis and AWS, Scotland is home to the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), a third-party certification center for new technologies. Scotland is geographically located in one of the five regions in the world with consistent and strong wave and tidal activity. The region’s leadership and drive in this area now mean that other regions are unlikely to overtake its position as wave energy leader.  MIT REAP members examined the unique characteristics of the region that enable this position and how the public and private sector actors contribute to its competitiveness.

The MIT REAP teams also covered the hot topic of accelerators and their recent proliferation across the globe. BillAulet, one of the three core MIT REAP faculty members, even wrote a small write-up in Startup Communities about the MIT Founders’ Skills Accelerator which gave 10 student-entrepreneur teams up to $20K to found a company this past summer. The MIT REAP teams were aware of accelerator’s potential to fulfill part four of the Boulder thesis: to engage the entrepreneurial stack. However, with that awareness also came a reluctance to simply launch copy-cat accelerators with low value to entrepreneurs and other participants. Yet the appetite remains strong for knowledge and transferrable take-aways from accelerators such as TechStars, as regions around the world continue to search for sparks to flame full-fledged startup communities.

This first cohort of regions will complete the MIT REAP program in late 2013, coinciding with the launch of a second cohort.  To learn more about becoming an MIT REAP member or how to put your own region’s initiatives and innovation-driven entrepreneurial activity on the map, you can visit reap.mit.edu.

About the author:
Beto Juárez III is a second-year MBA student at MIT Sloan and a Springworks scholar. In addition to helping administer the MIT REAP program, he is also writing a thesis on the formation of entrepreneurial communities, and is the co-founder of SpokeSwap, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace.