In the world of innovation and entrepreneurship, what gets measured gets managed. For startup ecosystems, where the goals are growth, job creation, and global competitiveness, measurement is not optional — it’s essential. Without data, it’s impossible to track performance, identify barriers, or align resources to the right opportunities.

However, data by itself is not enough. Success in any ecosystem is driven by an understanding of how that data compares to peers and global standards. Startup Genome’s ecosystem assessments provide both measurement and essential benchmarking to put your data into context. With insights gathered from over 100 startup ecosystems worldwide, we enable you to see how your ecosystem stacks up against others at similar levels of maturity, giving you a clear sense of your strengths and weaknesses.

Benchmarking is critical to making sense of the factors that drive ecosystem success. The dynamics of talent attraction, market reach, early-stage funding, and scaleup activity appear and behave differently depending on your ecosystem's maturity. In earlier stages of maturity, factors such as early-stage funding and startup activity may be top priorities. As ecosystems mature, success factors like scaleup support and global connectedness take on greater significance.

Startup Genome helps you identify which factors to prioritize based on the current maturity of your ecosystem. This ensures that resources are focused on the right areas at the right time, allowing you to maximize impact and avoid missteps that cost time and resources.

Understanding Your Ecosystem’s Development: The Ecosystem Lifecycle Model

Startup ecosystems evolve through distinct phases, each with unique characteristics and needs. To succeed, policymakers and ecosystem builders must understand which phase their ecosystem occupies and how to address the specific challenges at each stage. At Startup Genome, we’ve developed the Ecosystem Lifecycle Model, which identifies four key phases of ecosystem development. Rooted in data and real-world measurements, the Startup Ecosystem Lifecycle Model has become fundamental literature for startup ecosystem builders and policymakers across the globe.

The early phases may focus on nurturing startup activity and attracting seed funding, while more mature ecosystems often grapple with scaling ventures, securing later-stage investment, and expanding their global market reach. Misaligning strategies with the ecosystem’s phase risks missed opportunities and inefficiencies.

Our Ecosystem Lifecycle Model provides a tailored approach, allowing you to prioritize interventions that align with your ecosystem’s current stage. By diagnosing where you stand in the lifecycle, we help ensure that your efforts are directed toward the actions that will yield the most significant returns.

Moving Beyond Opinion-Based Decisions: Strengthening Insights with Data and Stakeholder Input

In many ecosystems, decisions are often shaped by the opinions, experiences, and perspectives of key stakeholders. While these viewpoints are invaluable, they can sometimes be limited by subjectivity or by a narrow focus on specific issues. To create a truly effective strategy, it’s essential to combine this local expertise with robust data and a broader, objective analysis.

At Startup Genome, we recognize the importance of both qualitative insights and quantitative data. Our approach blends data-driven analysis with insights gathered through holistic stakeholder interviews, ensuring that we capture the full complexity of your ecosystem. By combining on-the-ground perspectives with our global benchmarks and data collected from ecosystems worldwide, we help refine and validate opinions with concrete evidence.

This integrated approach strengthens decision-making, allowing ecosystem leaders to understand not only what the data reveals but also how it aligns with the lived experiences of local founders, investors, and other key stakeholders. By grounding opinions in data, we ensure that decisions are not only informed by local realities but also backed by global insights, providing a more complete and strategic view of the ecosystem’s needs.

This combination of stakeholder perspectives and data is essential for effective policymaking. With Startup Genome’s holistic assessments, ecosystem leaders can move beyond gut instincts and anecdotal evidence, crafting strategies that are both data-backed and deeply informed by the voices of those who know the ecosystem best.

For policymakers and ecosystem builders, identifying the right technology sub-sectors to prioritize can be a critical lever for driving long-term growth and competitiveness. Startup Genome’s sub-sector assessments provide the data and insights necessary to help ecosystems focus on the areas with the greatest potential for impact.

Identifying your ecosystem’s “Innovation Edge” involves measuring your clusters of excellence within both the local and global context. By going beyond startup ecosystem metrics and looking deeper within the broader innovation ecosystem – including patent activity, corporate networks, and university research outputs – we identify the vertical sectors and horizontal technologies where your ecosystem has the potential to outperform. The Innovation Edge analysis quantifies strengths across multiple sectors, including, but not limited to, Fintech, Agtech, and Cleantech, offering a clear data-driven view of which sectors are poised for growth.

For ecosystems in earlier stages of maturity, this focus on sub-sectors can be transformative. Evidence shows that even in younger ecosystems, supportive policies and strategic interventions in high-potential sub-sectors can enable regions to leapfrog more mature peers. By doubling down on sectors that have strong foundational assets and market opportunities, ecosystems can accelerate their development and attract critical resources such as funding and talent.

The Startup Genome team brings in the experience, advice, and network of our senior leadership team, having worked with 125+ ecosystem development organizations during the last 10 years.

In 2018, we began an assessment with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Action and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, an economic powerhouse providing ample opportunity for B2B models with a manufacturing and Deep Tech focus. Our analysis found that while good and consistent policy helped spur growth in startup activity and success in pre-seed and seed investments, the region showed significant gaps in scaling, attracting later-stage funding and growth talent, and realizing the economic effects and job creation that we would expect in a sophisticated ecosystem of its size. The ecosystem required a tailored strategy to measure, track, and enhance the rate of early-stage startups becoming scaling successes.

Our ecosystem assessment also identified ecosystem gaps and prioritized those in the context of a five-year development roadmap. Our work included modeling scenarios for economic impact and societal value creation to provide rational arguments for policymakers to act upon. Based on identified gaps, benchmarks, and best practices, we supported the development of a scaleup segment. We focused on defining a framework and key parameters for respective programmatic activity with a strong B2B and industrial tech focus. This included holding workshops that brought together policymakers and ecosystem stakeholders.

Since the beginning of our engagement, the ecosystem witnessed a doubling of the volume of startups and ~4X growth in Ecosystem Value. There is increased diversity within the ecosystem, particularly regarding the engagement of female founders, and the ecosystem has seen fast development of Deep Tech industry sectors, most notably in energy, Cleantech, and Agtech & New Food.

Following our strategy advice, the state government approved a significant investment into scale-up.nrw, a scaling program that addresses the specific support requirements of a carefully selected set of high-growth tech companies ready to expand across global markets.

Startup Genome’s ecosystem assessments offer a clear, actionable roadmap for driving growth and competitiveness. By combining data, benchmarking, and global expertise, we help you unlock your ecosystem’s potential and position it for long-term success.