This week, MassChallenge began a new initiative of employee continuing education courses — we are trying make sure that we focus on a bit of everything in these sessions so that our team can walk away from them with new skills and resources to do their job better.

I was asked to lead the first session on Startup Ecosystems. It’s a pretty broad topic but I decided to focus on what makes a startup ecosystem and how to map a startup ecosystem (using Boston’s as an example).

I’ve included my slides below as well as the example of Boston’s startup ecosystem and a worksheet you can use when mapping any ecosystem in the world. These are, by no means, comprehensive overviews but should be useful if you’re trying to begin to wrap your head around an ecosystem that you’re unfamiliar with. Please feel free to comment with any suggestions for improvement or other ways to improve this framework!

Here are the frameworks used in this exercise:

General Startup Ecosystem Map Worksheet

Sample Startup Ecosystem Map Worksheet on Boston

(NOTE: This is NOT a complete map and is intended to give a high-level overview of the Boston ecosystem. Many great and important organizations and people are missing from here)