The Work Is Already Happening, Even If We Don’t Always Call It “Ecosystem Building”
Recently, I was reading a Technical.ly article about Western Maryland’s new Acceleration Trail incubator, launched in Allegany County to support early-stage startups with six months of free space and mentorship.
The goal was to keep local talent from leaving, particularly university spinouts, and attract new founders to the region. But beneath the surface, something more important is happening.
Nathan Price from Allegany County Economic and Community Development said:
“We want to keep our students from leaving, and we want others to come here and set up shop.”
Put another way, entrepreneurial ecosystem building is, in fact, a business retention and attraction strategy.
Historically, Allegany County has struggled to retain younger workers. The county’s population declined 9.3% between 2010 and 2020, the steepest drop of any county in Maryland. More people are retiring than entering the workforce, making it harder for local businesses to hire and grow.
The incubator itself was funded through the Rural Maryland Economic Development Fund, created in 2022, which allocated $10M to Western Maryland. $100K of that was directed to launch this program. And while nearby Frostburg State alumni haven’t yet joined, the incubator has already attracted companies in cleantech and elder care.
One example is Ardon Hall, a Cumberland native who returned home after two decades in Los Angeles’ tech scene to build Clean Compost, a company helping regional farms and businesses comply with Maryland’s new food residuals recycling requirements. The county has also supported companies like Clym Environmental Services, which is close to opening a medical waste disposal facility.
This is the quiet power of ecosystem building. Legislation creates new markets, public funding lowers startup risk, and local infrastructure supports execution.
Whether by design or coincidence, when these pieces come together, opportunity compounds.
That pattern shows up everywhere, not just in rural counties doing the work quietly, but in major metro ecosystems where the same fundamentals apply.
The “Intangibles” That Actually Move the Needle
I was talking with Brooks Raiford, who leads the NC Tech Association, about what really drives company relocation and expansion, which has been a tremendous catalyst for North Carolina’s ecosystem growth.
He told me that yes, incentive packages matter. But what actually moves the needle are the intangibles, things like the connective tissue between organizations, the local talent base, the networks, and the sense that you can build something meaningful here.
That, I’d argue, is ecosystem building.
And when done well, it creates an economic flywheel. Startups grow, talent stays, larger companies follow, and the region compounds.
Orlando Didn’t Wait to Be Discovered. They Built the System.
Which brings me to Orlando. A region that has been building real momentum through deliberate ecosystem design.
Innovate Orlando described 2025 as the year Central Florida “stopped politely waiting to be discovered.” Instead, they got to work, launching rockets, training soldiers, detecting cancer, and building billion-dollar companies whether anyone was paying attention or not.
What struck me most was their ecosystem clarity. At the top are core capabilities, what the region is actually good at. Below that sit key industries, and below those, universities and research institutions feeding the talent pipeline.
Sheena Fowler, CEO of Innovate Orlando, describes this as an operating system. The same talent and technologies powering defense also run hospital systems, optimize launch operations, and build immersive experiences.
Every region should be asking what its ecosystem ingredients actually enable and how to leverage them for multi-sector growth.
The results are telling:
- Orlando’s tech workforce grew 15-21% over five years, compared to 11% nationally
- Median tech wage runs around $103K
- Average salary around $106K
- Median home prices are $90-125K lower than Austin’s
This is what ecosystem prosperity starts to look like. Any single data point doesn’t tell the full story. Together, they do. Workers can buy homes, raise families, and build stability, and that kind of stability is what distinguishes lived prosperity from abstract growth metrics.
And yet, Orlando is still under-invested. The region attracts $9.5K in VC per tech worker, compared to Austin’s $62K, despite comparable growth, better cost fundamentals, and a real customer base. One local angel investor, Jonathan Taylor, described the shift well. “Change arrives gradually, then suddenly.” After a decade investing solo in machine learning and data centers, he’s launching a new fund in 2026, a signal that ecosystem-building work eventually draws capital behind it.
Orlando’s story is instructive, but it also raises a harder question. What happens to ecosystem building when the very nature of work is shifting underneath it?
Why This Matters More in an AI-Forward Economy
The importance of thoughtfully designed systems is only increasing.
Recent data suggests 70-75% of enterprises believe AI will reduce headcount. If they believe it, it will likely happen.
I spoke with an economic developer in the Pacific Northwest who shared that their team is actively helping large employers become more “efficient,” meaning they’ll hire fewer people, while doubling down on entrepreneurship and small business ecosystems to absorb the shock. Prioritizing entrepreneurship alongside workforce efficiency is the right response to this moment.We’re entering a low-hire, low-fire labor market. Productivity is rising, not because people are working more hours, but because technology is doing more work. Recent data shows non-farm business productivity up 4.9%, driven by AI and automation. Firms are meeting demand without expanding payrolls.
If job growth continues to decline while productivity increases, we have to reckon with what we’re actually optimizing for.
GDP Measures Activity. Prosperity Measures Something Else.
That question is now being asked globally. At a recent UN gathering in Geneva, leading economists argued that GDP provides little insight into wellbeing, sustainability, or resilience. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said:
“Moving beyond GDP is fundamental to building an economic system that gives value to what counts, human wellbeing, now and in the future.”
GDP measures activity, not outcomes. It can grow while communities struggle.
As Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty, argues, economic growth does not automatically equal human progress.
I agree, though I don’t think growth and prosperity are inherently incompatible. In business, there’s a saying that what gets measured gets managed. The problem isn’t growth itself. The issue is that prosperity rarely makes it onto the scorecard.
That’s why we’re reintroducing Gross Domestic Prosperity. Originally coined by Barman, we believe now is the time to modernize the way we measure local economic success to look at whether people can actually thrive. Just because AI is booming and data centers are being built doesn’t mean communities are prospering. But they could, and we should measure that explicitly.
So what does prosperity actually depend on? The data points to something economic developers have known for years, even if the broader conversation hasn’t caught up.
Entrepreneurship Is the Bridge
Research backs this up. The Urban Institute shows that income growth over the last 50 years has been uneven across states, with education and workforce development being the strongest predictors of prosperity.
At the same time, the Urban Institute finds that 52% of Americans are just making ends meet, and only 33% report living comfortably. Traditional metrics capture acute poverty but miss the broader picture of economic insecurity.
Third Way’s Business Opportunity Blueprint highlights entrepreneurship as a path to resilience and wealth building, especially as traditional workforce models strain under AI-driven change.
Yet according to an IEDC Study, 83% of economic development organizations focus primarily on business attraction, while only 2% focus primarily on entrepreneurship. That mismatch is worth sitting with.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are the strategic bridge between economic growth and shared prosperity. They create diversification, local ownership, and resilience, but only if we design systems, not just programs to support them.
This is exactly what ecosystem builders are already doing, even when it goes by other names.
Reclaiming the Economy Together
Each January, there is a Reclaim the Economy Week, a global week of action organized by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and Earth4All. I’ll admit I didn’t know that until recently. But it resonates, because ecosystem building is, in many ways, an effort to reclaim the economy. To build more pathways to prosperity, for more people, in more places.
I’m not an economist or a policymaker. I’m a tech founder who has the privilege of working with ecosystem builders across the country. And I believe that if we build better systems, measure what actually matters, and invest in shared infrastructure and coordination, prosperity can follow. This is the work of ecosystem building.
I’m inviting you into this conversation, and looking forward to exploring how we build economies that work better for more people. Let’s talk: sherrod@ecomap.tech.