ABSTRACT
An entrepreneurial ecosystem that fosters community development by creating and innovating solutions to the community's problems through leveraging its assets must include government, the education subsystem, nonprofit social services, entrepreneurship support organizations, private business support entities, religious and cultural institutions, and service clubs, among others. It must include forums for networking and social capital building among these players – in the parlance of entrepreneurship, "co-working spaces" – that permit their physical coming together in order to share challenges, solutions, and resources and to find common values, while building trust in the process. The ecosystem must also take full advantage of social media tools in this effort to foster interaction. Social entrepreneurs build assets that can provide cultural, natural, and social wealth, while civic entrepreneurs can generate assets that contribute to built, cultural, intellectual, and political wealth.
