Winning the Field: An Eagle-Eye View of Ecosystem-Building

In the Season 1 finale of Ecosystem, Scale!, Aaron Taylor sits down with Andy Stoll, founding Executive Director of the ESHIP Alliance, for a wide-angle conversation about the emergence of entrepreneurial ecosystem building as a field of practice.

Over the past two decades, ecosystem builders across the country have been quietly working to strengthen the environments where founders turn ideas into reality. What began as scattered community efforts is now beginning to organize into something larger: a professional field with its own practices, leadership models, and support structures.

Andy offers an eagle-eye view of this movement zooming out to examine the national landscape of ecosystem building while also reflecting on the culture, relationships, and leadership required to make these communities thrive in practice.

At its core, ecosystem building is a team sport a collaborative effort to move knowledge and resources from the people who have them to the entrepreneurs who need them at the right moment.

This conversation closes the first season of Ecosystem, Scale! by zooming out to ask a bigger question:

What happens when the builders themselves begin to organize into a field?

About Our Speaker

Andy Stoll is a serial social entrepreneur and the founding Executive Director of the ESHIP Alliance, a national initiative working to advance entrepreneurial ecosystem building as a recognized profession and coordinated field. Over the past two decades, Andy has co-founded multiple social change organizations and helped pioneer community-driven approaches to entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development.

Previously, Andy served as a Senior Program Officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he helped advance entrepreneur-led economic development and ecosystem building as an emerging practice. His work focuses on participatory, network-based approaches to social change that combine entrepreneurship, storytelling, culture-building, and community leadership.

Andy is a sought-after speaker and facilitator who has appeared at SXSW, TEDx events, universities, and conferences around the world, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Connect with him here: linkedin.com/in/andystoll

Resources:

https://www.kauffman.org/ecosystem-playbook-draft-3/eship-goals/

https://eship-commons.mn.co/spaces/18645947/feed

https://www.startupchampions.co/

https://www.seedthesouth.com/

$50 off code for Seed the South Capital Summit: STS26-CEDAR-50