Colorado is home to a rich legacy and entrepreneurial spirit, with thousands of new businesses forming each and every year. A large ecosystem consisting of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies works together to support entrepreneurs and small businesses with education, funding, networking, and other strategies.

However, this system exists in a distributed and de-centralized way that makes it difficult to see the whole picture of how everyone connects and works together. This makes it difficult to figure out where the system is working well, and where there is room for improvement.

Visible Network Labs is working with a number of partners in this space to begin mapping and analyzing the ecosystem using an innovative approach. We plan to use social network analysis techniques to map the ecosystem from both a systems-level perspective and from a bottom-up individual viewpoint as well, to integrate both perspectives into our final map.

With this new visibility into the entrepreneurial ecosystem, our partners can identify key points to leverage for improvement and create new resources and tools to better support entrepreneurs.