What is an innovation ecosystem diagnostic?

An innovation ecosystem diagnostic is a structured assessment that evaluates how well a region's institutions, programs, capital flows, and talent pipelines work together to support innovation and economic growth. Ecosystem Navigator uses the LINK framework to score your region across key strategic dimensions and produce actionable recommendations.

What does the paid Ecosystem Navigator platform include?

The USD $499 annual platform makes the complete research loop unlimited: 15-question Quick Diagnostics, Build stakeholder exercises, combined group results, Explore analysis across reports and places, five strategic Deep Dive modules, grounded follow-up questions, stakeholder briefs, branded custom reports, portfolio views, and repeated fixed-question exercises.

How long does the innovation ecosystem diagnostic take?

The diagnostic takes approximately 5 minutes. You answer 10 questions about your region, and your report is generated instantly. No account is required to start.

Who is this innovation ecosystem diagnostic for?

Ecosystem Navigator serves seven professional perspectives: economic development officers, local government leaders (mayors, city managers, policy staff), university tech transfer and research leaders, investors and VCs, entrepreneurs and startups, corporate innovation teams, and NGOs, foundations, and international development organizations. Anyone responsible for understanding or improving a region's innovation capacity.

What do I get in the free innovation ecosystem diagnostic report?

The free report includes an executive summary, Virtuous Innovation Cycle diagnosis, an ecosystem scorecard across 35 strategic dimensions, an innovation asset map, a statistical economic profile, and a prioritized action plan with research citations. A free account can save up to two reports.

What is an innovation asset map?

An innovation asset map identifies and plots the key organizations that make up a region's innovation ecosystem — universities, research labs, incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms, economic development agencies, and more. Ecosystem Navigator generates one automatically for your region as part of every diagnostic report.

What is economic complexity and why does it matter for my region?

Economic complexity measures how diverse and sophisticated a region's productive capabilities are. Regions that produce a wide variety of hard-to-replicate products and services tend to grow faster and be more resilient. Ecosystem Navigator uses economic complexity research — pioneered at Harvard and MIT — to evaluate whether your region is building the capabilities needed for long-term competitiveness.

Can I benchmark my innovation ecosystem against other regions?

The free diagnostic gives you a serious baseline for your own region. The complete workspace adds deeper analysis, stakeholder briefs, share-ready outputs, and the structured peer comparison, portfolio views, and regional benchmarking you need once you have enough diagnostics to compare.

What is a regional innovation scorecard?

A regional innovation scorecard quantifies the strengths and gaps across the dimensions that drive ecosystem performance — talent, capital, infrastructure, knowledge flows, and more. Ecosystem Navigator scores your region across 35 sub-dimensions and visualizes them in a structured scorecard so you can see exactly where to focus.

What does role-aware framing mean?

When you run the diagnostic, you select your professional perspective — economic development, government, university, investor, entrepreneur, corporate innovation, or NGO/foundation/impact. The underlying diagnosis doesn't change (scores and findings are system-level truths), but recommendations and narrative emphasis are framed for your specific context, action levers, and decision-making authority.

Built forEconomic Development Government Universities Investors NGOs & Foundations

Regional intelligence for economic development

Turn local expertise into clear priorities for regional growth.

The Groundbreakers Ecosystem Navigator gathers structured input from the people who know your place, shows where their views align and diverge, and produces a decision-ready analysis you can share with partners, boards, and councils.

Run a free 5-minute diagnostic Get the complete workspace, $499/year

10 questions · 5 minutes · No account required to start

Start with your place

Build your first analysis in five minutes

Choose a place and your perspective. The diagnostic configures its questions around that ecosystem.

10 questions · No account to start · Save 2 reports freeGet the complete workspace, $499/year

235Ecosystems mapped

351Reports generated

14Countries

“Economic development teams spend far too much time waiting for information to come back and then trying to piece the patterns together ourselves. Having a platform that takes structured expert input, surfaces the trends, and turns it around quickly, almost in real time, is extremely valuable. That speed changes the conversation.”
Michael Catsi, President & CEO, Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County

A diagnostic you can inspect

See what the first diagnostic puts on the table

The free diagnostic gives you a complete starting point: a cycle diagnosis, a map of real regional assets, and prioritized actions grounded in local evidence.

Regional diagnostic showing the four-stage innovation cycle and its primary bottleneck — See where the cycle breaks
Give the room a concrete finding to examine together.

Innovation asset map showing universities, funders, infrastructure, and other regional institutions — Ground it in real assets

Prioritized regional recommendations with partners, timeframes, and research support — Focus what happens next

“The platform works. Structured input from economic development professionals across different parts of the county produced clear trends and divergences on growth and innovation. The recommendations were useful and realistic, and the people who answered the questions confirmed the synthesis captured their thinking. That validation is what gives you confidence to take it forward.”
Michael Catsi, President & CEO, Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County

←

Creation3.8

Explore full report

Each report is a complete ecosystem analysis. Click any card to explore.

A shared research process

From local perspectives to clear priorities

Ecosystem Navigator shortens the blank-page stage of research. It gathers informed local perspectives, shows where they align or split, and focuses the interviews, workshops, planning, and commissioned work that follow.

Diagnose

Run a locally tailored diagnostic. The free version uses 10 questions; the complete workspace uses 15 for a richer baseline.

Compare

Invite people across roles or places, then see where their responses confirm one another and where perspectives diverge.

Decide and measure

Investigate the evidence, share clear priorities, and repeat the same exercise to make change visible over time.

The platform does not replace the final strategy, business interviews, or facilitator. It gives that work a faster, locally grounded place to begin.

Get the complete workspace, $499/year

Every Question Is Configured for Your Region

Before you answer a single question, we scan your region's actual institutions, programs, and assets — so every question maps to real conditions on the ground, not generic placeholders.

Generic Survey

“How quickly do ecosystem leaders adapt their innovation strategies in response to major market shifts?”

What you actually see

“How quickly do leaders at the MetroHartford Alliance, the City of Hartford, and academic institutions like UConn Hartford and the University of Hartford adapt their innovation strategies in response to major market shifts or unexpected events affecting the Hartford area?”

Every question references your actual institutions so your answers — and your report — reflect reality, not generalities.

What Practitioners Are Saying

From economic development professionals using the diagnostic.

“You get a lot of these reports that come out from various entities and they're so generic that they could have written them about nine-tenths of Western Canada. But the Ecosystem Navigator from the Groundbreakers was clearly very local. There were enough tangible, specific things that I recognize to go, 'Oh yes, this actually knows our region'.”
— Economic Development Officer, Alberta, Canada

“I compared it against the 100+ pages we got from a $100,000 regional impact study the provincial government paid for. The Groundbreakers Ecosystem Navigator generated very comparable outputs, found many of the same issues... but yours actually added the additional piece, identifying the need for angel investment to help move the ecosystem forward, which was a clear gap in the original study. From a value-added perspective, yours had more powerful, actionable insights than this third-party report.”
— Economic Development Officer, Alberta, Canada

“I found the report would be a good way to ground us all, to say, 'Okay, here are some of the objective things that are necessary to move the ecosystem forward'. It would give us a common language and a common way to talk about it ... because the university is obviously going to approach it from an academic perspective, someone from a private sector company, they're going to come at it from a very different perspective. The report, in my mind, could be like a convener... a way of getting everybody on the same page in a discussion document.”
— Economic Development Officer, Alberta, Canada

Begin with better questions

Use the same locally grounded research loop to focus five common economic development processes. The platform establishes the starting evidence; your team decides what to investigate and act on next.

Strategic planning

Establish a baseline and focus the interviews, workshops, and commissioned work that follow.

Business retention & expansion

Surface recurring barriers and sharpen the questions to take into business visits and follow-up calls.

Investment attraction

See which regional strengths are credible, which gaps weaken the case, and what needs validation.

Entrepreneurship & startup support

Trace where talent, connections, commercialization, capital, and reinvestment stop reinforcing one another.

Workforce development

Bring employers, educators, government, and economic development into one comparable evidence set.

A diagnostic is not the finished plan. It is the structured first pass that tells the room where to begin, whom to call, and which assumptions need testing.

One paid tier · USD $499/year

The whole platform. Unlimited.

Free gives you two saved 10-question diagnostics. The paid platform removes the limits and opens the complete research workflow for every place, exercise, and follow-up question.

15-question Quick

Run richer baseline diagnostics for any place, as often as the work requires.

Build exercises

Invite stakeholders or communities and generate combined group results.

Explore evidence

Analyze reports together, compare perspectives, and ask questions across the corpus.

Six Deep Dives

Investigate a strategic dimension when the baseline points to something worth pursuing.

Also included: stakeholder briefs, grounded Q&A, saved evidence, branding, custom reports, share links, PDFs, portfolio views, and repeatable fixed-question exercises. Participants do not need paid accounts.

Get the complete workspace, $499/year Talk with Ian See everything included

“There's real value here. When you put the right structured questions in front of people who know the place and then synthesize those responses into clear, shareable priorities, you get something that can actually move the work forward. The third-party feedback we've seen confirms the recommendations are landing accurately. That's the foundation for better decisions and stronger partnerships.”
Michael Catsi, President & CEO, Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County

Inside the complete workspace

See the ecosystem together, without flattening the differences

Build a group diagnostic, compare every response, and turn alignment and disagreement into a shared analysis the group can investigate.

Perception divergence

See where places differ from the group

The most important differences become visible immediately: who reads the ecosystem more optimistically, who sees greater constraints, and where the gap is largest.

Included in the $499/year workspace

Open full-size image

Perception divergence heat map across four responding places — The view expands with the number of responding places; no rows or places are cropped.

Question-level disagreement

See exactly which questions divide places or participants, rather than losing the disagreement inside one average.

Open full-size image

Question-level comparison across four responding places — The view expands with the number of responding places; no rows or places are cropped.

Build

Set up the group exercise in one place

Choose who is assessing what, invite participants, and track responses. Completed diagnostics flow into Explore for the shared analysis.

Get the complete workspace, $499/year

One annual plan. Unlimited diagnostics, group exercises, Explore, and Deep Dives. Secure checkout through Stripe.

Build workspace for creating a multi-place group diagnostic

Built on Research, Not Guesswork

The LINK framework synthesizes corporate strategy theory, economic complexity research from Harvard and MIT, and insights from 50+ interviews with innovation ecosystem leaders.

Economic Complexity

Measures how diverse and sophisticated your region's productive capabilities are — a predictor of future growth. Pioneered at Harvard and MIT.

50+ Practitioner Interviews

The framework is grounded in conversations with innovation ecosystem CEOs, EDOs, and university leaders across 6 countries.

The Groundbreakers LINK framework — how innovation ecosystems create value through Arenas, Vehicles, Differentiators, Staging, and Economic Logic

Read about the LINK framework

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I get in the report?▾

The free report includes an executive summary, VIC cycle diagnosis, 35-dimension scorecard, innovation asset map, statistical economic profile, prioritized actions with research citations, PDF export, and a share link. A free account can save up to two reports.

What does the USD $499 annual platform include?▾

Unlimited 15-question Quick Diagnostics, Build stakeholder exercises, combined group results, Explore analysis across reports and places, six Deep Dive modules, grounded follow-up questions, stakeholder briefs, branded custom reports, portfolio views, and repeatable fixed-question exercises.

Who is this for?▾

Economic development officers, local government leaders, university tech transfer and research leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, corporate innovation teams, and NGOs/foundations.

How long does it take?▾

The free baseline diagnostic takes about five minutes: 10 questions tailored to your region, with no account required to start. Group exercises and Deep Dives are designed to fit the scope of the research process you are running.

Can I use this for grant applications?▾

The report can provide a structured, evidence-backed appendix or discussion document for a grant application. Treat it as a starting analysis and review the evidence, local claims, and recommendations before formal submission.

Give the next conversation somewhere concrete to start

Run a free baseline diagnostic in five minutes. When the work expands, bring stakeholder perspectives, shared evidence, deeper investigation, and repeated measurement into one workspace.

Run a free diagnostic

10 questions · No account needed to start · Save up to 2 reports free

Ready to involve a group or investigate further? Get the complete workspace, $499/year and everything it includes.