The Entrepreneurial League SystemŽ is an innovative approach to developing entrepreneurial talent, creating successful companies and building entrepreneurial communities. The Entrepreneurial League SystemŽ is not just a metaphor, a philosophy or a mere set of ideas—it is a powerful operational system that consists of a set of well-designed business activities and tools that communities can utilize to:

1. Create a pipeline of highly skilled entrepreneurs capable of building successful companies in sufficient numbers to transform a region’s economy and create individual as well as community wealth.
2. Organize the private, public-sector and non-profit business service providers into a coherent system, so that entrepreneurs can get the right technical and financial assistance at the right time and the right price.
3. Develop champions, or community entrepreneurs, capable of creating and managing an entrepreneurial community.

Creating a Pipeline Developing the region’s pipeline of entrepreneurs and enterprises involves three major activities:

• Performance Coaching
• Talent Scouting
  
• Opportunity Scouting

Connecting Entrepreneurs to Services and Resources

Entrepreneurs in many communities face a chaotic array of offerings for consulting and technical assistance (e.g., private consultants, Small Business Development Centers, SCORE chapters, university centers, banks, loan funds, venture funds, etc.). The challenge for entrepreneurs is to get the right help, at the right time and the right price, no matter where they are located.

The Entrepreneurial League SystemŽ establishes a third-party, web-based brokerage function that links entrepreneurs from all segments of the pipeline with available services and resources, in ways that are systemic, market-driven and highly targeted.  The participants include both private as well as non-profit and public sector services providers.

By adopting a common framework that was specially designed for the purpose of capturing and communicating what service providers do and surgically matching those service to entrepreneurs’ needs the performance of the service providers as a whole can become greater than the sum of the parts.

Developing Community Champions 

The third component of any entrepreneurial community is a set of skilled and committed leaders or champions. These leaders must be capable of creating a favorable environment for entrepreneurship. To do so, they must in turn also be entrepreneurial, but in a different domain, in the arena of building and managing communities of entrepreneurs, resource providers and citizens. In this domain, bureaucratic skills and authority relationships must be replaced by social capital building among equals and win/win solutions.

The Entrepreneurial League SystemŽ utilizes a similar assessment framework to determine entrepreneurial skill levels of community leaders and their ability to manage the process of building an entrepreneurial community. It should come as no surprise that our global economy makes equal demands on the skills of our civic leadership. If we are to compete successfully, we must raise the entrepreneurial skill of all groups in our community.

The Entrepreneurial League SystemŽ coaches community leaders to more effectively and holistically manage the Pipeline of Entrepreneurs and Enterprises in their region, strategically as well as tactically.

All of these components and the way in which they interact, lead to a system capable of improving its results over time. All of these elements are designed to be mutually reinforcing, so that the results the system produces are greater than the sum of its parts.