StartUp Spokane
Spokane Public Library
Innovation Synopsis
Launched in October 2023, StartUp Spokane is a collaboration between Spokane Public Library and the Spokane County Library District. The goal of StartUp Spokane is to position Spokane as the most equitable region to start, run and grow a business. We do this by democratizing access to top-shelf business resources as well as fostering connections to local business expertise. In addition to providing valuable resources to our local business community, StartUp Spokane serves as the connective tissue for the ecosystem. We tie together the work of our local SCORE chapter, the SBDC, Women’s Business Center, local chambers of commerce, BIPOC-owned business associations, CDFIs, and more. We do this by convening regular meetings of the “Knowledge Network,” a group of 40+ local organizations who are engaged with economic development. With libraries’ organizational DNA being built around sharing valuable resources, public libraries are the perfect vehicle for promoting local economic development.
Challenge/Opportunity
StartUp Spokane aims to solve multi-layered challenges in the Spokane business community. Primarily, there is a lack of direction and guidance for local entrepreneurs who want to start a business. There are any number of “How to start a business” checklists in the online world and they usually consist of surface-level advice like write a business plan, research your competition, or determine your marketing strategy. Such guides tend to list each of those topics as an individual bullet point and then leave the aspiring entrepreneur dropped off in the middle of the wilderness with no tools, direction or guidance on how to complete those tasks. The second gap that StartUp Spokane fills is one of infrastructure. While recognizing that we don't have to provide all the muscle in terms of local economic development, StartUp Spokane can fill a valuable community role where we act less as the muscle and more as the connective tissue between all our local business development organizations.
Key Elements of Innovation
- StartUp Spokane acts as a guide to the essential elements required for starting a business.
- StartUp Spokane provides equitable access to expensive business research tools across our community. Those tools can be viewed at https://startupspokane.com/res...
- For those resources that fall beyond the budget of the library, StartUp Spokane has successfully employed a crowdsourcing approach to several different resources, most notably PitchBook and CoStar.
- Spokane provides infrastructure to our local business support organizations. A noteworthy contribution is the development of a community business events calendar which will provide a single location to find (and plan!) business events for the Spokane community.
Achieved Outcomes
Spokane Public Library is at the forefront of public libraries working to democratize the process of business ownership and entrepreneurship. For the first six months of 2024, StartUp Spokane has met one-on-one with 205 local businesses as well as conducted group presentations for an additional 209 attendees. The StartUp Spokane community calendar democratizes access to business and entrepreneur events regionally, as well as providing access to cost-prohibitive platforms like PitchBook (at $19,000/year) and CoStar (at roughly $6,000/year) to anyone in the area. Lacking StartUp’s presence, those tools wouldn’t be available on a community-wide basis.
