This article answers:
What does it mean for an entrepreneurship ecosystem to support the whole founder, not just the business?
How did West Virginia build trust between institutions that used to compete for the same resources?
What is the practical difference between ecosystem building and providing direct services to entrepreneurs?
Ecosystem builders talk often about technical assistance, the coaching, the pitch decks, and the capital stack. Fewer of them talk about the founder who cannot make a meeting because it is planting season, or the one weighing whether starting a business is even the right call for their family right now. Amber Ravenscroft has spent her career on that second conversation, and she joined EcoMap co-founder and CEO Sherrod Davis for an Ecosystem Talks conversation about what it takes to support the whole small business, not just the parts of it that show up on a balance sheet.
Watch the conversation on YouTube.
Ravenscroft is President and Founder of the Bridging Innovation Institute, which now serves as the backbone organization for the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, a thriving rural ecosystem that hosts Bridging Innovation Week annually, a five-day, thousand-plus-attendee statewide event. Raised in rural Appalachia, her work rests on the idea that lasting economic growth depends on trust-based systems that connect education, workforce, and entrepreneurship rather than treating them as three separate lines of work.
How does West Virginia's K-12 work shape its entrepreneurship ecosystem?
Ravenscroft did not start her career in entrepreneurial support. For years, she led entrepreneurship and innovation work at The EdVenture Group, where she helped build West Virginia's K-12 entrepreneurship pipeline. This naturally connected to the ecosystem building efforts happening at the state level through connections with higher education.
She sees that connection as deliberate rather than incidental. West Virginia has an aging population and a long history of exporting its talent, and state leaders decided that inspiring young people to build their futures at home had to start before college. Pre-K and K-12 students have been part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem conversation from its earliest days, with the West Virginia Department of Education and the state's higher education institutions as partners across a pre-K to 16 pipeline that exposes students to design thinking and entrepreneurial mindset at every stage.
Ravenscroft argues the value of that mindset extends well past students who go on to start a company. "An entrepreneurial mindset is going to benefit a student whether they start a business or whether they go into a business," she said, describing it as a foundation for critical thinking and problem solving that outlasts any single career path. The EdVenture Group's SparkWV competition puts cash behind that idea, awarding prizes to students who pitch and launch their own small businesses while still in school.
What does it mean to support the whole founder, not just the business?
Ravenscroft draws a direct line between how education systems are supposed to support the whole student and how an entrepreneurship ecosystem should support the whole founder.
"We are not just providing them with the specific technical expertise that they need to launch their business, but we're creating the system in which they can thrive.". Amber Ravenscroft
In West Virginia, that means acknowledging that workforce availability, child care, and internet access shape whether a founder can focus on their business at all. Ravenscroft described sitting with a founder to talk through whether launching a business was even the right next step for their family, and helping that person find the right support to bring their family along with the decision. She also described a founder who could not reliably answer emails because she was working her farm and asked her to call instead so he could chat while operating her tractor. Supporting the whole founder means building an ecosystem flexible enough to meet people where they are.
How do you build trust between institutions used to competing for the same resources?
Davis pressed Ravenscroft on how West Virginia built the kind of trust that makes coordination possible, since trust is often the hardest thing for an ecosystem to manufacture on purpose.
Ravenscroft traced it back to two people at rival institutions, Tara St. Clair at West Virginia University and Bill Woodrum, then working on the Marshall University side. WVU and Marshall have a long-standing perceived rivalry, and their entrepreneurship programs were hosting events on the same days and competing over the same resources. A neutral third party pushed them to sit down and compare notes, and the meeting that resulted happened, fittingly, over lunch at a neutral Mexican restaurant. Both sides were hesitant at first.
What started as one meeting became a standing monthly one, built around a shared calendar and an open invitation to anyone who wanted to show up. Ravenscroft calls the resulting approach working with the willing. Keep inviting people to the table, keep your word when you say you will do something, and let the ecosystem eventually hold itself accountable once the willing outnumber the unwilling. Seven years later, that grassroots, volunteer-led effort had outgrown what any single member organization could support on its own, which is what led Ravenscroft to found Bridging Innovation Institute as its dedicated backbone nonprofit.
What is the difference between ecosystem building and providing direct services to entrepreneurs?
Bridging Innovation Institute and the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem do not coach founders or provide capital directly. Ravenscroft described the organization's role with a phrase she picked up at a Federal Reserve conference, triage and trampoline. A founder reaches the ecosystem, gets a short conversation to understand where they are, and receives a warm referral to the right partner. The ecosystem coordinates with other state partners, including the West Virginia Small Business Development Center, West Virginia Business Link, the state's newly created Office of Entrepreneurship, to support this triage process at scale. West Virginia is working hard to ensure there’s no wrong door and multiple entry points vs. a single source of information.
That triage role has its own compounding effect. Resource providers get stronger, better-prepared referrals instead of cold leads, which strengthens their own outcomes and their case to funders. Founders get faster, more accurate navigation instead of working through a directory on their own. Ravenscroft described it as a cycle that reinforces itself once enough of the ecosystem trusts the referral process.
That same trust is what lets the ecosystem address overlap without it turning into a turf fight. When two resource providers are unintentionally duplicating a program, the ecosystem will work with private, state, and federal funders to ensure that unnecessary program duplication is avoided.. Ravenscroft said that kind of gentle funder nudge only works because the underlying coordination and trust were already in place.
How did Bridging Innovation Week grow into a statewide flagship event?
Bridging Innovation Week now draws more than a thousand attendees, but it started from the same instinct as the ecosystem itself, convening before trying to collaborate. The event gives resource providers a low-cost way to host their own sessions under one shared roof, with the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem handling registration and logistics so individual organizations do not have to run their own conference.
Ravenscroft calls the format a South by Southwest model, a central week built around core days of ecosystem engagement and competitions and surrounded by a variety of partner-hosted events. Statewide competitions like SparkWV and IgniteWV are timed to align with the week, in part so out-of-state investors only need to carve out one trip to see West Virginia's founders in one place. Country Roads Angel Network, the state's accredited angel investment network, holds an event there as well.
The clearest sign of the event's growth, in Ravenscroft's view, is who shows up. In its early years, most attendees were people already engaged in the ecosystem - individuals she and her colleagues already knew personally. Now, more than half of the founders attending Bridging Innovation Week found it through word of mouth rather than a direct invitation. She sees that shift as the point of the work, an ecosystem that people can find and join, not one that stays limited to whoever the organizers already know.
How should ecosystem builders measure impact beyond individual program metrics?
Davis and Ravenscroft spent time on a problem that comes up across ecosystem building. Most data systems are built to measure a single program, not the referral path a founder takes across five of them. Ravenscroft described tracking things like referral velocity and responsiveness rather than only counting jobs created or businesses launched, and floated an idea the ecosystem has been kicking around, a founder friendliness score built from the things founders themselves say are most important to them.
She also pointed to anecdotal evidence as a legitimate solution for the measurement problem rather than a soft substitute for it. She recalled a partner connected through Bridging Innovation Week who ended up helping bring gBETA to Marshall's iCenter, an accelerator program, because of a single introduction made at the event. Stories like that carry useful information about how the ecosystem functions, and Ravenscroft said part of the ongoing work is figuring out how to track themes across those stories in a way that can stand next to harder economic development metrics like the Kauffman Foundation's Indicators of Entrepreneurship.
Closing thoughts
Ravenscroft was candid about what worries her heading into the next phase of this work. Philanthropic and federal funding for entrepreneurship support is shifting, and some of West Virginia's resource providers rely heavily on federal dollars that carry their own funding risk. Her concern is less about any single program and more about whether rural communities that may only have one or two resource providers available to them can keep that support in place through a funding lapse.
What she is optimistic about is closer to home, West Virginia's new Office of Entrepreneurship, designed to coordinate agency engagement at the state level, and a broader national conversation that increasingly treats ecosystem building as essential economic development work rather than an add-on to it.
The through line across the conversation was that none of this required an outside authority to mandate collaboration. Two people at rival universities sat down over lunch because a trusted colleague asked them to. A standing monthly meeting started with a shared calendar and no budget behind it. The advice Ravenscroft gives to a state or region earlier in the process is not to wait for funding before getting people in a room. Coordinate a call, get updates on what everyone is doing, and let the trust build from there.
About the Speakers
Amber Ravenscroft is President and Founder of the Bridging Innovation Institute, which serves as the backbone organization for the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem. She co-chairs Bridging Innovation Week, a five-day statewide event with more than a thousand attendees, and National Entrepreneurship Week. Raised in rural Appalachia, her work is grounded in building trust-based systems that connect education, workforce, and entrepreneurship.
Sherrod Davis is co-founder and CEO of EcoMap Technologies and hosts most Ecosystem Talks conversations, where he interviews practitioners across ecosystem building, economic development, and entrepreneurial support.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Bridging Innovation Institute? The Bridging Innovation Institute is a West Virginia nonprofit founded by Amber Ravenscroft that serves as the backbone organization for the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, coordinating resource providers and connecting founders to the right support rather than providing direct coaching or capital itself.
What does "triage and trampoline" mean in ecosystem building? It describes an ecosystem's role in meeting a founder where they are, understanding their needs, and giving them a warm referral to the right resource provider, rather than the ecosystem organization providing that service directly.
How did West Virginia's entrepreneurship ecosystem start? It began as a grassroots, volunteer-led effort, sparked when leaders from rival institutions West Virginia University and Marshall University were encouraged by a mutual mentor to compare notes on their overlapping programs. What started as a single meeting became a standing monthly gathering built on trust.
How does the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem measure its impact? Rather than tracking only individual program outcomes, the ecosystem looks at measures like referral velocity and responsiveness, alongside statewide indicators such as the Kauffman Foundation's Indicators of Entrepreneurship, and is exploring ways to track themes from founder stories as a complement to those numbers.
Where can a state or region earlier in this process start? Ravenscroft recommends coordinating a call among resource providers to share updates on what everyone is working on, without waiting for dedicated funding first. Trust and coordination, in her experience, come before the money rather than after it.