The Hindrance of Silos
My entire career, even before entering the world of entrepreneurial ecosystems, has focused on getting different entities to talk with and work together with one another. This started during graduate school, while I served on the executive board of The University of Iowa Mobile Clinic. This student group started as a project of medical students and faculty providing basic health examinations and screenings in an old city bus, but the group wanted to do more for different groups of people in need around eastern Iowa. Health care is more than just a visit to a free clinic when you’re sick – prevention and education are also critical.
As the only non-medical student on the board (getting my Master of Public Health at the time,) I began to push the organization to bring in other health sciences students. It’s rate to find a doctor’s office without a nurse, so why weren’t we inviting nursing students to help? As we saw during the pandemic, pharmacists are able to perform certain vaccinations, so why weren’t we including them in our flu shot clinics? If we wanted to branch into dental health, we needed to include dental students. By the time I left the board, the program had branched well beyond basic physical examinations into a fully-functional, integrated health care program for vulnerable populations in the area, and the board had representation by nearly all of the health sciences programs on campus.
I carried this spirit into my work as a freelancer back in the early and mid-2010s, and as I began to transition into an ecosystem builder, I had the tools to bring people together to build our local startup community. As I’ve said so many times on my Freelance Media Blog, we have all of the pieces statewide to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem on par with larger Midwestern competitors, but it involves different major players across the state to build bridges and not demand to be the main character in the partnership. However, this is a bigger ask of some organizations than I first realized. The silos are incredibly entrenched.
You’ve probably heard of the concept of silos – no, not the places where grain is stored. A siloed organization does its work and refuses to work with other nearby organizations. Heavily siloed organizations engage in turf wars with their actual or imagined competition. In building ecosystems, there is a small amount of competition between certain programs, but the whole is the greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to helping new and underserved entrepreneurs build their businesses. For the most part, different organizations around the state are doing mostly different things. However, turf wars still exist due to protectionism and pride.
When the pandemic happened in 2020 and everything went online, I thought that we might have moved past these silly squabbles over who does what better. We were all equal partners when we were on Zoom. Folks from across the state came together to build programs like Startup Weekend Iowa Online which, in its first two years had over 120 participants from across the state and around the world. Folks seemed to be willing to finally work together, and I thought this was one of the silver linings from that era. However, as we all emerged from our home offices, some of the same battles seemed to appear once again.
I believe that the refusal of organizations to share information and cross-promote events and services is the greatest disservice to entrepreneurs in the community. Building a startup is hard enough without having to navigate between organizations that won’t work together. As a community, my greatest hope is that organizations across the state realize that the community is stronger when we work together. Yes, it’s fine to be proud of your programs and what your organization has accomplished. What’s not productive is petty feuds because you wear one set of colors and your “competition” wears another. This makes us less competitive with neighboring states and is part of the reason people consider leaving our ecosystem. It’s an outmoded way of thinking that will hopefully disappear in the coming years.
Deconstructing the silos across the state will depend on the larger organizations’ willingness to look outside themselves and realize that they are not in direct competition with one another. From universities, to government agencies, to nonprofits, we have great programs across the board that dovetail together quite nicely. Someone interested in building a startup can form a team at Startup Weekend, then attend Venture School, followed by Kauffman FastTrac®, gaining mentors along the way. Multiple firms in Iowa can provide prototyping assistance, the state of Iowa can provide Proof of Commercialization funding, and multiple niche accelerators and venture studios can speed up the process of growing and scaling. Institutional money is available and big events are just a registration form and ticket away.
As you can see, we have all of the pieces in places to guide entrepreneurs from start to finish across the state of Iowa. Des Moines doesn’t have all of the pieces, nor does Cedar Rapids, nor Iowa City. My hope for the coming years is that leaders across the state realize the benefit of working together on projects and programs so that our builders benefit. I have faith that new people gaining leadership positions and those like myself, building new organizations, can undo the damage of decades of siloing. Smart leaders know when to step aside and let the next generation continue building and pivoting, changing with the changing times. What worked in 2005 doesn’t work the same way in 2025.
My hope for the next five to ten years is to see organizations across the state embrace the idea of a statewide ecosystem rather than localized startup communities. While we could be robust enough to be self-sustaining in the future, we’re just not at the point of critical mass just yet. With your help, we can reach that critical mass.