“The essence of an entrepreneurial ecosystem is its people and the culture of trust and collaboration that allows them to interact successfully. An ecosystem that allows for the fast flow of talent, information, and resources helps entrepreneurs quickly find what they need at each stage of growth.” -Robert D. Putnam

What Is An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem?

An entrepreneurship ecosystem includes anyone or any organization supporting and encouraging entrepreneurship. An ideal entrepreneurship ecosystem map would contain all the people, resources and organizations that exist in an environment (in our case, all the provinces and territories of Canada) that support, encourage, nurture and sustain entrepreneurship.

Why is It Important to You?

A key deliverable of the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (BEKH) is to create a national network and geographic map of the Canadian Black entrepreneurship ecosystem. This map will provide you and your entrepreneurial efforts with national visibility to potential customers, funders and investors as well as provide the possibility for partnership, procurement opportunities and more. By collaborating with us, you will be able to tap into a network of resources, support and opportunities that are available to Black business owners and entrepreneurs.

Building the Ecosystem Map: Our Process

Having discussed the technical aspects of the project, we now turn to the data, information and resources needed to populate the map. The involvement of Black entrepreneurs, the wider BEKH community, other community stakeholders, as well as the organizations funded under the Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP), is crucial to the creation of this map to ensure that the design directly meets the needs of entrepreneurs. Using this process of continuous collaboration, the community and experts are helping us to document the relevant information, resources, and locations on the map.

The information provided to us from community would help inform which key organisations and ecosystem actors need to be reflected on the map, which entrepreneurial activities need to be highlighted and where all these organisations and actors are located geographically.
Meetings with the community provide a space where subject experts and community members connect and combine their different ways of viewing and analyzing the world and, in the process, generate new knowledge and technologies for mapping and understanding the Black entrepreneurship ecosystem. This knowledge forms the basis from which the GCRC team will build the prototype of the ecosystem map platform.

The prototype will be tested in community consultation meetings to enhance the map and ensure that it fits the needs of its users. The data and prototypes will be demonstrated at our annual symposia for feedback and the process of improvement repeats and continues. This map is a living, dynamic document that aims to always reflect the current state of Black entrepreneurship in Canada.

Goals, Aims and Outcome

By uniting with our community partners to help understand and document ecosystem characteristics, we are building a map that will:

Support patronage, and support visibility of Black entrepreneurs to people inside and outside of the Black community by cataloguing Black business capabilities, skills-sets and business services with the aim of creating a search tool for the Black entrepreneurial ecosystem. This would make it easier for users to connect with others in the ecosystem to fulfil their business needs.
Enable collaboration and partnership opportunities by facilitating communication among entrepreneurs, potential clients, and vendors.
Make visible the capabilities and capacities of Black businesses.
Facilitate and enhance mentorship by identifying support services and connecting entrepreneurs to them.
Provide a platform with the information needed to inform research around entrepreneurship, regional difference, and perform a gap analysis that could ultimately inform legislature.

This list of outcomes was produced with the assistance of the community and in collaboration with Black entrepreneurs and the organisations that support them. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents our top, long-term objectives for mapping the black entrepreneurial ecosystem. Together, we will build a network of Black businesses that will enable our ecosystem to connect and thrive.

The process of creating this map involves many steps and various experts to build a map that is useful and beneficial to Black entrepreneurs. Through the financing support of Innovation, Science, Education and Development Canada (ISED), the technical expertise of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC) at Carleton University along with BEKH’s co-lead organization, Dream Legacy Foundation (DLF), and the broader BEKH team, researchers are adopting and adapting multiple theories and technologies to produce and utilize a detailed mapping of the Black entrepreneurship ecosystems across Canada. This will include creating detailed regional concept and geographic maps, data and infrastructure sovereignty plans.

Be a Part of our Community Mapping

There is still more work left to be done. We are continuing to engage with communities across Canada to ensure the BEKH captures a comprehensive picture of Black entrepreneurship. We are committed to ensuring that more voices and perspectives are shared. We encourage you to join our community mapping efforts and have your organisation featured on the map. To connect with us about future engagement events, please email ecosystem.bekh@carleton.ca.