A project is underway to create a dataset of Utah’s entrepreneurial community. Leaders from an organization based in New York City are here to launch the Mapping Utah project.
Rhett Morris is Director of Endeavor Insight, a research organization aimed at growing the number of high impact entrepreneurs and start-ups across the globe. Over the next year, Endeavor and local partners will conduct hundreds of interviews with Utah entrepreneurs and comb through social media data. The idea is to produce a comprehensive analysis of the economic ecosystem that is establishing Utah as a hub of innovation. Morris says they uncovered valuable information when they did this in New York.
“One of the things we found was relationships between entrepreneurs can actually be very important and very predictive for their success,” Morris says. “For example, if I am an entrepreneur in New York City, and I have a mentor who is also an entrepreneur and that person has been successful, I am three times more likely to become successful then someone who doesn’t have a mentor like that.”
Morris says they’ve done this process in 15 major cities across the world, but Utah is the first state and first multi-cluster map they will build. “Utah is a place that has seen some pretty significant successes in its history, and it can be a role model for other communities,” he says. “The things we’re learning here in Utah are going to help us create lessons that we’re going to share with people in other communities across the United States, but also… cities and states across the world.”
The project will be conducted in partnership with Quatere, a Utah-based nonprofit organization. It’s funded in part by federal grant money, the World Bank, the Kauffman Foundation, and JP Morgan Chase. Rhett Morris will present the “Mapping Utah” concept at the State Capitol Building Thursday afternoon.