The Entrepreneurial League System® is a trademarked and proprietary version of a similar but more generic approach to enterprise development that my colleague Tom Lyons (from Baruch College in New York City) and I also developed called the Entrepreneurial Development System.

The concept and this term, which we coined, first appeared in our article entitled The Entrepreneurial Development System: Transforming business talent and community economies, that was published in 2001 in Economic Development Quarterly. With our permission, both the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and CfED used this article as the inspiration for the $12 million grant program they initiated in June 2004, to fund six regional entrepreneurial development systems (known as EDS).

In that article, we laid out the design requirements for an Entrepreneurial Development System, a set of requirements that the Entrepreneurial League System® operationally fulfills.