• The updated Technical.ly Ecosystems Map is now the most comprehensive summary of entrepreneur-led economic development in the country, reflecting that nearly every state can point to something resembling a startup ecosystem.
• Three recurring gaps explain why places struggle: People can’t tell what exists or how to navigate it (visibility), programs exist without a shared story tying them together (coherence) and outsiders can’t quickly validate what’s real or credible (legitimacy).
• The most common blocker to growth is the gap between having activity and being able to explain it, because durable legitimacy is becoming a strategic advantage.
The most interesting part of this month’s major update to the Technical.ly Ecosystems Map is this: It’s now the most comprehensive summary of entrepreneur-led economic development in the country.
Every state has some strategy, so each is included in our tracker. Across the country, nearly every region can now point to something that looks like a startup or innovation ecosystem.
There are programs. Accelerators. Pitch competitions. Entrepreneur support organizations. Task forces. Reports. New job titles with “ecosystem” in them. Similar efforts result in similar challenges, and so an “ecosystem stack” is emerging, alongside field-wide best practices. This is good: Entrepreneur-led “ecosystem building” and staid economic development are entwining.
And yet, when those outside a region’s inner-circle ask a harder question — What actually exists here, how does it work and why should anyone outside this region believe it? — many places struggle to answer.
This gap is becoming more consequential, not less.
As federal funding becomes more competitive, more politicized and more outcome-oriented, regions are being asked to prove their ecosystem’s value, not just promote it. Funders want coherence. Policymakers want evidence. Founders want navigability. And increasingly, AI systems want structured, credible signals to surface in search and synthesis. (Yes, AI visibility is developing now and too few are paying attention).
Having activity is no longer enough. Regions need legibility. Way back in 2019, the Kauffman Foundation’s “entrepreneurial ecosystem playbook,” influential among a small if proud group of local organizers with a fixation on business creators, surprised some by listing “storytelling” as one of its key pillars. Why? Transparency, connectivity and awareness.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen this challenge repeat itself across states and metros, regardless of size or ideology. The issue is rarely effort or intent. It’s structure.
Those three gaps remain, yet traditional economic development is stuck in an era in which tossing a press release out was a communications strategy. They engage policymakers and business leaders, shuffle paper and fund and operate programs. But consider what they’re missing.
Gap 1: The Visibility Gap
People can’t tell what exists, who it’s for or how to navigate it.
This is the most familiar problem, and the one regions usually try to solve first.
Assets are fragmented across websites, PDFs, LinkedIn pages and institutional silos. Programs come and go. Names change. Links break. Even insiders struggle to keep track.
From the outside,especially for founders new to a region, the ecosystem feels opaque. From the inside, leaders know the work is happening but can’t point to a single, shared baseline that says, “This is what our ecosystem actually looks like today.”
Somebody says “We need to track this!” and a well-intentioned volunteer spins up a spreadsheet or map. Those who fully recognize the size of the challenge increasingly seek a more formal solution, which is what category-creator SouceLink and fast-moving competitor EcoMap seek to address.
Visibility is foundational. But as anyone down this path knows, a resource directory is helpful but on its own incomplete. Encouraging engagement with the tool is hard, and context (what program is good, who is respected, what is real) becomes thorny.
Gap 2: The Coherence Gap
Programs exist, but there’s no shared story tying them together.
Many regions successfully surface activity, yet still struggle to explain how the pieces fit.
Entrepreneur support programs, economic development organizations, workforce boards, universities, philanthropies and municipalities may all be doing good work, but often with different language, metrics and audiences in mind. Each stitch together something resembling a communications strategy: They operate social media accounts (with meager reach), buy placement in national publications selling name brand prestige, blast out newsletters to emails they bought or to existing relationships, and circulate press releases to a dwindling number of working journalists.
The result is not a lack of storytelling, but too many disconnected stories.
This matters because modern ecosystem building — especially the entrepreneur-led, place-based approach — depends on coordination. It’s the very heart of the ecosystem metaphor. Founders don’t experience programs in isolation. Funders don’t evaluate initiatives one by one. Policymakers increasingly ask how efforts align with broader state or federal priorities.
Without coherence, regions look busy but unfocused.
Gap 3: The Legitimacy Gap
Even when activity is real, outsiders can’t validate it.
This is where many regions quietly get stuck.
They know the ecosystem is real. They can list names and programs. But when it comes time to compete for federal dollars, philanthropic investment or national attention, they lack something harder to define: external legitimacy.
Legitimacy isn’t hype. It’s not press hits. It’s the ability for someone not embedded in the region — a reviewer in Washington, a foundation officer, a relocating founder or an AI system synthesizing information — to quickly understand:
- What exists here
- How it fits together
- Why it matters
- How credible it is
We’d call this a narrative. Pittsburgh faces all sorts of challenges, for example, but that slice of Western Pennsylvania was Technical.ly’s pick for ecosystem of 2025 because its robotics and AI legacy is amounting to a cohesive story of why it’s worth investing in. No surprise that the region landed $62.7 million in federal funding toward its entrepreneurial and workforce strategies.
In today’s federal funding climate, that gap is widening. As we’ve explored recently, tech and innovation funding is increasingly shaped by political scrutiny, fiscal uncertainty and demands for clearer public value. Regions that can’t clearly explain their ecosystem, especially in ways that are legible beyond their own networks, are at a disadvantage.
Why this keeps happening, and the coming shift
Many places still treat “storytelling” as a low-level marketing function. As an output of stuff we do, so it falls into the bucket of “Eh, if we get to it, we can email a bunch of people and put out a newsletter.”
But what’s emerging is something different: ecosystem storytelling as infrastructure.
Entrepreneur-led economic development, by definition, is distributed. It doesn’t live inside a single agency. That’s its strength, and its challenge.
Without shared narrative infrastructure, regions default to insider-only closed networks with siloed communications, and successes go underappreciated. That does not create durable legitimacy.
Some regions are starting to approach this differently. Instead of asking, “How do we promote what we’re doing?” They’re asking, “How do we make our ecosystem legible across the board, to funders, founders and the systems increasingly shaping discovery?”
That shift shows up in clearer ecosystem baselines, shared language across organizations, and data-informed narratives that complement, not replace, lived experience. It also incorporates an understanding that AI search and synthesis are now part of the audience, whether we like it or not.
Every US state now has some stated commitment to entrepreneurship-led growth. The question is no longer whether regions are doing this work. It’s whether they can explain it clearly, credibly and consistently. Some do this better than others already, and it’s clear the regions pulling ahead aren’t necessarily louder. They’re more coherent.
As competition for funding intensifies and attention fragments, the regions that succeed will be the ones that treat ecosystem narrative not as a campaign, but as shared civic infrastructure. That work is slower. It’s less flashy. But it lasts.
And in a world where legitimacy increasingly determines access — to capital, talent and policy support — legibility is becoming a strategic advantage.
