An eight-member consortium
The challenge
In January 2024, a Boston Consulting Group report on Atlanta’s goal of becoming a top-five startup city named higher-education coordination as one of four gaps to close. Atlanta’s universities have the talent and the research money, including more than $2 billion a year combined at Georgia Tech and Emory. But the report found that Georgia Tech, despite spending nearly 20% more on research than MIT, produced fewer than a third as many patent disclosures, and that real coordination across the schools was missing. A few pairs of schools collaborated, but there was no shared table.
Our challenge was to bring eight members, each with its own priorities, budgets, and leaders, to shared goals and a regular rhythm, working with the city’s technology office and without any of us having authority over the others.
What I did
- Wrote the consortium’s governance and operating framework in 2024.
- Set up recurring meeting and reporting cadences, and built stakeholder maps so each institution’s priorities were visible.
- Co-created a value proposition that spells out what each stakeholder gains in the short and long term.
- Coordinated more than 100 meetings and events and more than five programs that cross institutions, including support for a research cohort and two founder-incubator cohorts.
- Led a seven-school exhibition at a regional startup conference in 2024.
The result
All eight members have stayed engaged since launch.
Together we ran two pilot programs and three Avant South conferences, held four First Pitch Fridays, and raised about $90K in shared funds through a corporate partnership that one member university led.
What I took from it
I started this work new to the field and learning as fast as I could. At a national conference I went to every session on building ecosystems and working across universities, and one of them walked through the Kauffman Foundation’s ecosystem-building playbook. It felt like finding a map. I studied it, got to know the presenters, and they pointed me to a peer-learning program for ecosystem builders.
If I was going to take that journey, I wanted the people I work with to take it with me. I negotiated a group rate, wrote a funding proposal to my director using city-supported collaboration funds, and built a cohort of 11 Atlanta colleagues: the consortium’s universities, the city, another college, and two more who joined with their own leaders’ approval. It deepened our relationships and brought the group into better alignment.
The consortium taught me three things:
- I manage without authority, so buy-in comes from relationships and from a shared win: if one of us wins, we all win.
- I learned to map power dynamics honestly and still build a table with an equal seat for everyone.
- I learned the fundamentals of ecosystem building by practicing them, with the whole group beside me.