How to Build a Strong Pipeline of Entrepreneurs for your Innovation Hub (Founder’s Institute)

Most innovation hubs and economic development programs underperform for the same structural reason: not enough promising applicants. The result? Empty incubators, freelancer-occupied co-working spaces, and funding going to a small number of un-promising companies. Drawing on lessons from 17 years running global incubators and accelerators, Jonathan Greechan (Co-Founder and CEO of the Founder Institute) will walk through strategies that successful entrepreneurship programs use to generate large volumes of applicants and companies.

What You'll Learn:

• Why most innovation hubs and economic development programs underperform and the structural fixes that programs in 200+ cities have actually figured out.
• How to build connected programming that takes a workforce of latent talent all the way to deal-ready ventures plugged into your local capital.
• How to identify entrepreneurial talent already sitting inside your local workforce and what to do once you've found it.
• How AI-native tools are compressing program timelines and measurably increasing founder velocity, without becoming a buzzword.
• Real-world examples from the field