By Chris Heivly, Managing Director at Build The Fort and Startup Community EIR @ Techstars

In most nascent or developing startup communities, we see a similar playbook over and over. Someone launches a pitch competition, another builds a co-working space, and a handful of well-meaning folks start running founder coffee meetups. These are good activities — really, they are. They are the fundamental building blocks of a healthy ecosystem. But if we’re being honest, they’re also largely incremental innovations. They are local reboots of well-worn models seen in Boulder, Austin, or Raleigh-Durham.

And while incremental innovation keeps the engine warm, it rarely shifts the car into a new gear.

So here’s the real question: Is there space in your ecosystem for a bold, breakthrough innovation that is so uniquely tailored to your community that it fundamentally changes the trajectory of everything?

Let’s zoom out.

Incrementalism is comfortable. It feels safe. It’s like updating the UX on a website instead of rethinking the entire user experience. Or tweaking your pitch deck one more time instead of asking whether you're solving the right problem in the first place. In community building, it looks like "version 1.1" of something someone saw in another city, polished up and renamed for the local flavor. It’s familiar — and that makes it easier to sell to sponsors, stakeholders, and risk-averse partners.

But comfortable actions rarely spark revolutions.

Breakthrough innovation in an ecosystem context is messy, bold, and most times a little scary. Here’s the hard part, if it is truly innovative, there are not really great examples for me to share. Why? Because one person’s incremental innovation may be another person's breakthrough innovation. It's that slippery.

But I do know this — copying is not enough. I also know that trying something a little crazy takes support from everyone in the ecosystem. You need room to fail, iterate and try again. 

Breakthrough innovative ecosystem activities take guts. And, often, they take community leadership that’s deeply connected, confident, and aligned around long-term impact — not just short-term optics.

But here’s the kicker: communities that break through don’t do it by accident. They make intentional bets. They create space for the big idea. They trust their own instincts about what their founders really need instead of borrowing blindly from another city's brochure.

Yes, every community has to crawl before it walks, and walk before it runs. But at some point, if all you’re doing is a slightly different version of what already exists, you may be holding your community back from the leap it truly needs.

So, I’ll leave you with this:

Are you ready to create something your community has never seen before?

Something that could only be built here, by you, for your people?

That’s what breakthrough looks like.

And maybe it’s time we stopped waiting for permission and kicked off your next ecosystem conversation with, “I got this crazy idea, what if we . . . .”

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