Services

We partner with regional leaders across the country to accelerate their entrepreneurial successes. While the measurable goals of this work—producing more high potential businesses that can create new jobs, and building a stronger, sustainable ecosystem to support them—are the same regardless of the region with which we’re collaborating, how we get there varies greatly.

Ours is a tailored approach similar to the process Northeast Ohio’s business and philanthropic leaders experienced when creating JumpStart in 2003 and 2004. The process is fundamentally based on collaboration and partnerships. We collaborate with each region’s existing entrepreneurs, investors, regional government leaders, philanthropists, and economic development professionals from beginning to end. Often, what starts as an advisory group for the process leads to individuals choosing to continue their involvement as leaders in the region’s new ecosystem.

There are three phases of work JumpStart leads in collaboration with each regional advisory group:

1. Planning In this phase, we identify all existing entrepreneurial support organizations, build collaboration among those entities, and assess the region’s entrepreneurial strengths and opportunities through primary and secondary research. From that information, we build a Regional Entrepreneurship Action Plan (REAP) to leverage strengths and fill gaps.
   
   
2. Capitalizing During this phase, we help regions secure the financial resources necessary, through public, private, and philanthropic partnerships nationally and regionally, to implement the REAP. Separately, but in support of these regional projects, we are working with dozens of national philanthropic organizations to raise capital to fund regional REAPs. Learn about our work to raise this funding through our JumpStart America initiative.
   
   
3. Implementing In this phase, we help regions turn their REAP into functioning programs or organizations that help build competitive, high growth, and sustainable companies. Our work in this area can be ongoing and includes management recruiting, operating procedures, program design, metrics system development and implementation, ethics and conflict of interest policies, and a host of related details critical to program or organization’s success. Read more about this kind of work, which we currently do in Greater Cleveland.

If you're interested in learning more about how we help accelerate regional entrepreneurship, contact us.