Collaborative Strategies is a business that specializes in facilitating transformations – of the entrepreneur, the enterprise and the economy of the community or region. These outcomes require two very important competencies:

1. The ability to design or architect social systems that facilitate these transformations or changes.
2. The ability to operate and manage such innovation systems on a regional basis.

Collaborative Strategies specialized in designing innovation systems that focus on incubating new enterprises. The right business design or architecture for an innovation system can be the source of incredible power and competitive advantage in the marketplace for both communities and corporations.

But we are more than simply a designer of such systems, we operate them as well. We are skilled at being able to work with all kinds of entrepreneurs without relying on a bureaucracy or any kind of authority structure to produce results. This is especially critical given the coaching task faced by anyone that wants to incubate a group of innovators, entrepreneurs, mavericks and rule breakers who are intent on establishing new enterprises. By their very nature, such individuals do not respect authority, rules or traditions. And that is as it should be. However, successfully coaching these individuals, requires a very different and unique set of skills than those possessed by typical enterprise development program managers.

Building entrepreneurial communities and transforming entrepreneurs, enterprises and regional economies is not a linear process. As a result, the manager of such a system (this is the role played by the General Manager of the regional Entrepreneurial League System®), must facilitate, they cannot dictate. They must create the kind of system or environment that empowers, incentivizes and encourages the right kind of behavior on the basis of free will. They must be comfortable with rule-breakers and encourage them. They must be able to deal well with uncertainty and to operate in the highly unstructured situations that are part of the start-up process. And, they must produce results.

These are our team’s core capabilities.