The Coordination Opportunity
- Dirk Bischof
- Feb 6
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 12
This is our second article in our 3-part series on enterprise support ecosystems where we explore how strategic investments into coordinating activities will achieve broad-based returns for all stakeholders involved, If you've missed the first article, click here.
What Happens When Enterprise Support Organisations (ESO's) Stop Competing and Start Connecting
Most people think ecosystem coordination requires massive new investment.
They're wrong. And that misconception is costing us millions in lost impact.
Here's what actually happened when several enterprise support organisations in London, representing different models (charity-led programmes, corporate accelerators, university incubators), decided to stop operating in parallel and start building infrastructure together.
They didn't get a big grant. They didn't wait for council leadership. They just started coordinating.
The lead organiser told me: "It's becoming ever more important that we come together as providers to ensure we're talking with one voice, measuring the same data, sharing best practices, and doing a better job of supporting founders, collectively."
Simple idea. Profound implications.
Within 18 months, this collective leadership model demonstrated something that challenges everything we assume about ecosystem development:
Coordination isn't expensive. Fragmentation is
What infrastructure actually means
When we talk about ecosystem infrastructure with councils and corporates, we often see eyes glaze over. The term conjures images of expensive platforms, complex technology, years of planning.
That's not what infrastructure means here.
Infrastructure is the coordinating mechanisms that allow individual programmes, whether run by charities, corporates, or universities, to function as an integrated system.
Let me show you what this costs versus what we assume it costs:
Shared measurement system that tracks founder progress across organisations without repeated data entry:
Build cost: £100K-150K (if building on an existing system, probably cheaper)
Annual maintenance: £30K-£50K
Current cost of fragmented reporting requirements: Typically higher due to duplication, esp. when measuring costs across all stakeholders (eg founders, ESO's, funders)
Referral pathways that operate automatically based on founder stage and needs:
Additional cost: Zero (beyond coordination time)
Requirement: Trust between organisations (takes time to build)
Blended funding vehicle combining council budgets, corporate investment, philanthropic capital, social investment:
Example structure: £2M fund (£500k council, £750k corporate, £500k philanthropy, £250k social investors)
Makes 20-50 investments annually of £10k-£50k
Recycling returns fund future cohorts
Common impact metrics agreed across all programmes:
Requires facilitated alignment process
Ongoing cost: Coordination capacity only
Single entry point where founders access the ecosystem through coordinated triage:
Digital infrastructure: Modest cost
Coordination capacity: More significant but manageable
None of this requires massive new investment.
It requires will to coordinate and someone to hold the coordination role.
That's the infrastructure gap most ecosystems face: not lack of activity, but lack of connective tissue.
The three moments that determine everything
Ecosystem effectiveness isn't uniformly distributed across a founder's journey.
It concentrates at specific inflection points where coordinated support determines whether founders progress or plateau.
The validation moment occurs when someone with an idea needs expert assessment of viability. Not encouragement from family, but informed evaluation from someone who understands the market.
One founder described this: "That first session was so important in teasing out of me what I actually wanted my business to do."
Without this validation, founders spend months building things the market doesn't need. With it, they pivot early and save wasted effort.
The belonging moment often proves most underestimated.
"I was very surprised to see there were other migrant women and it was very empowering because it was like, I'm not alone," one founder reflected.
Connection to peers facing similar barriers reduces isolation and creates mutual support networks that persist beyond formal programmes. One founder noted: "The founders are so inspiring and it was such a motivating factor to see them every other week and watch them make progress because it urges you to make progress as well."
This mutual accountability mechanism costs nothing. But it requires deliberate cohort design to activate.
The traction moment arrives when business models work, customers pay, and growth becomes possible. This is when founders need capital, procurement opportunities, corporate partnerships.
It's also when ecosystems most frequently fail.
Support and encouragement matter. But they're not sufficient. Traction requires access to opportunity, not just advice. Procurement pathways. Customer introductions. Investment that matches stage and sector.
Fragmented ecosystems provide advice generously but opportunity access sporadically. Corporate accelerators may offer procurement access but lack the wrap-around support. Charity programmes offer community but struggle to open commercial doors. University programmes build technical skills but don't always connect to capital.
What actually works: the evidence base
Before examining solutions, let's establish what works when support is properly structured.
Data from cohort-based programmes targeting underrepresented founders reveals three consistent success factors:
First, targeted support reaches communities mainstream accelerators miss.
Programmes designed for women founders, ethnic minority entrepreneurs, and founders from low-income backgrounds consistently achieve demographic participation that venture capital can't match.
Research shows VC funding to marginalised founders sits in the low 1-2% range (female founders), and below 1% for minority ethnic, female founders (0.34%, Forbes 2022). Yet in well-designed ecosystems like those we've supported, 80% of participants came from ethnic minority backgrounds, 81% identified as women or marginalised genders, 83% focused businesses on UN Sustainable Development Goals (Hatch Impact Reports, 2023-24).
These aren't cherry-picked outliers. They're systematic outcomes from intentional design.
Second, structured peer cohorts accelerate capability development beyond what individual mentoring achieves.
Founders completing cohort programmes in our ecosystem reported (Hatch Impact Reports, 2023-24):
123% increase in ability to access funding
92% increase in measuring impact
73% increase in communicating impact
55% average skills increase across all areas
Third, community infrastructure that persists beyond programme completion creates compounding returns.
Founders maintaining connections years after graduating continue sharing networks, making referrals, providing peer support. This "aftercare ecosystem" often matters more than the formal curriculum.
The challenge? These three factors produce exponential results when connected across an ecosystem.
But that connection rarely happens.
The corporate engagement nobody talks about
Corporate involvement deserves specific attention because the gap between potential and reality remains so large.
Consider the resource mismatch:
Corporate Britain spends billions on ESG reporting whilst local enterprise ecosystems struggle for multi-year funding in the hundreds of thousands. Councils operate economic development programmes on budgets that wouldn't cover a single corporate marketing campaign.
This isn't because corporates don't care about community impact. Most genuinely do. Many run their own accelerators and innovation programmes.
But engagement models haven't evolved beyond charitable giving or siloed corporate programmes to strategic ecosystem partnership.
One corporate partner working with an enterprise support organisation reflected: "It is not only a way for our colleagues to use their experience and skills to benefit others, but it is also a way to learn about the barriers and challenges facing different communities and know that for some, the access to networks that can really help propel business ideas is a privilege that sadly not everyone has."
That insight, that network access represents privilege rather than merit, points towards more effective engagement.
Instead of one-off mentoring days, corporates could open procurement pipelines. Instead of running standalone corporate accelerators disconnected from the broader ecosystem, they could integrate with existing programmes to create pathways. Instead of CSR grants for discrete projects, they could commit to multi-year funding that allows programmes to build capacity. Instead of parachuting volunteers into programmes, they could second experienced staff for sustained periods.
Some corporates are testing these approaches. The results suggest significant potential.
The same corporate partner noted: "We see that those teams engaged in skills-based volunteering will also be more engaged in most other sentiments about their role, which means they are more productive and happier."
Corporate engagement structured properly delivers value in both directions.
Founders gain access to networks, expertise, and opportunity. Corporate teams develop understanding of entrepreneurship challenges, build skills in mentoring and coaching, and connect with communities they serve but don't always understand deeply.
The question isn't whether corporates should engage with local ecosystems. Most already do. The question is whether that engagement follows strategic partnership models or remains stuck in charitable donation patterns and isolated corporate programmes that neither side finds fully satisfying.
The economics of coordination
Here's what happens when ecosystems shift from fragmented to coordinated, based on our analysis comparing performance across contexts where both exist:
Conservative estimates suggest coordinated ecosystems could produce:
40% increase in business survival rates
60% growth in investment into local businesses
50% reduction in coordination costs across organisations
25% increase in businesses started by underrepresented founders
These projections are based on observed differences between fragmented and coordinated ecosystem performance in comparable contexts.
The infrastructure investment pays for itself within 18-24 months through:
Reduced duplication (multiple organisations stop teaching identical content)
Improved founder outcomes (better survival rates = larger tax base)
Decreased organisational burden (less time on admin = more on delivery)
Increased investment attraction (connected ecosystems reduce investor risk)
One organisation's strategy demonstrates this systems thinking: "Strategic partnerships that keep founders at the heart. More engaged, strategic, multi-year funding partnerships highly aligned to mission delivering maximum benefit to founders. Prove and improve: Invest in internal systems, data and knowledge building to better manage, communicate and increase impact."
The language matters.
Not "more programmes" but "strategic partnerships." Not "more funding" but "aligned funding." Not "growth" but "systems and data."
This reflects understanding that scaling impact requires coordination infrastructure, not just increased activity.
What coordination looks like in practice
The collective leadership model working in London reveals insights applicable beyond any specific group:
Shared measurement enables collective impact claims. When organisations agree on common metrics, they can demonstrate ecosystem-level outcomes that individual impact reports can't capture. This makes the case for larger investment more compelling.
Referral pathways reduce founder navigation burden. When organisations know each other's offerings and trust each other's quality, they can hand off founders appropriately rather than forcing repeated applications. A charity programme can connect to a corporate accelerator. A university incubator can link to VC-backed support. Founders move seamlessly based on need, not organisational boundaries.
Collective voice increases policy influence. Councils and corporates respond more readily to ecosystem-wide asks than individual organisational requests. Coordinated advocacy for infrastructure investment carries more weight than fragmented lobbying.
One member noted: "We're now starting to move beyond conversation to ambition, which is exciting."
That shift from talking about coordination to actually implementing it marks the inflection point where fragmented ecosystems begin transforming into integrated ones.
The question you should be asking
If coordination creates non-linear returns, costs less than fragmentation, and the playbook exists, why doesn't this happen everywhere?
Because no single actor can build it alone. Because funding structures reward new programmes over coordination capacity. Because measuring individual organisational impact is easier than measuring collective ecosystem outcomes.
Because we've confused activity with effectiveness.
But here's what we've learned after 12 years in this space:
Someone has to move first. And that someone doesn't need permission, massive funding, or perfect conditions.
They need clarity about what coordination actually requires and the will to start building it.
In Part 3, we'll break down exactly what each stakeholder type should do differently, and why the leadership required isn't what most people think.
Which brings me to the question that matters most: In your ecosystem, who's ready to move first?
Dirk Bischof founded Hatch Enterprise in 2013 and led it for 12 years, supporting over 10,000 entrepreneurs whilst developing insights into what makes ecosystems work. He now focuses on investing with impact as a partner at Korra Ventures and advisory/ consulting services through Venture Impact Partners.
Caroline Gormley is an award-winning consultant specialising in strategy, philanthropy and funding models for charities and impact-led organisations. With 18+ years' experience, she partners with organisations to align purpose and performance.
Together, we help local authorities, corporates and foundations design coordinated enterprise ecosystems through three core services:
Building new coordinated programmes from scratch
Auditing existing support for effectiveness and impact
Convening and coordinating provision for increased impact using place-based or thematic approaches
Ready to explore how these insights apply to your ecosystem? Let's talk.
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