Explore the framework behind the book
How to build entrepreneur ecosystems that actually work.
The core idea of We’re Doing This Wrong is simple: entrepreneurial ecosystems do not fail because they lack activity. They fail because the activity is not arranged around the founder’s real path, real timing, and real constraints.
Programmes are tools. Architecture is the system that makes the tools matter.
The thesis
Regions do not win because they run more programmes. They win when capital, customers, talent, trust, and timing are designed around the founder’s real path.
What is Ecosystem Architecture?
Ecosystem Architecture is the framework for moving beyond startup support as a collection of programmes. It asks a harder question: what has to be true around a founder so better companies can form, learn, sell, hire, finance, and scale before institutional friction absorbs the opportunity?
Programme model
Architecture model
The formation-stage imperative
Support that arrives after the market, product, capital path, team, and first customer assumptions are fixed is often just late-stage applause.
Institutions optimise what they are rewarded for. Ecosystem Architecture changes the measurement system so institutions are rewarded for founder outcomes.
Useful ecosystems make the right customers, investors, operators, universities, corporates, and experienced founders easier to reach when they matter.
AI compresses formation-stage windows. Slow programmes are no longer merely inefficient; they can become structurally irrelevant.
The four-layer model
Find potential founders early: researchers, operators, students, repeat builders, domain experts, and overlooked talent before they are visible to formal programmes.
Make capital, customers, talent, tools, labs, data, and expert guidance reachable as a connected pathway rather than a fragmented map.
Help founders make better choices around market, product, pricing, incorporation, IP, first hires, capital, and customer discovery.
Remove avoidable friction before it compounds into abandoned IP, wasted runway, bad pilots, weak teams, or companies that leave the region.
The ecosystem flywheel
A functioning entrepreneurial ecosystem does not look like a calendar full of startup events. It looks like a place where talent knows where to go next, capital is accessible rather than merely present, customers take the first useful calls, universities reduce friction, corporates behave as credible partners, and experienced founders build forward.
The flywheel is not just about momentum. It is about direction. Without deliberate design, capital concentrates too early or too late, talent leaks out, corporate engagement becomes theatre, and policy gets written for optics instead of outcomes.
From programme proliferation to systematic design of innovation infrastructure.
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