The first step to building an entrepreneurial community is to raise awareness among community and area residents about the possibilities for building strong local businesses, preserving community character, enhancing quality of life, strengthening community networks, and creating local opportunity.
Once a community realizes its possibilities, the next step is to mobilize a cadre of local leaders to create a vision for a vital entrepreneurial community. Because the strongest vision is a shared vision, local leaders must reach out to the public and to key stakeholders to identify community assets, including individuals, organizations, businesses, institutions, and physical resources. By reaching out to community assets, entrepreneurial community leaders not only engage stakeholders in the process of developing a shared vision, but they also leverage key resources to develop and implement an entrepreneurial community plan for achieving the desired vision.
Finally, once the plan is on paper, all that remains is for the stakeholders to act. Action is where the long-term commitment from the community must begin. Because few communities maintain all of the necessary resources to achieve success, action often begins by leveraging regional, state, national, and/or global assets in order to implement the entrepreneurial community plan.
