Recently, I had been named a member of the Steering Committee for the Moore County Entrepreneurship Initiative headed up by Partners in Progress (Moore Co. Economic Development) and the Moore Co. Chamber of Commerce in partnership with Forward Communities. The initiative is to research the feasibility of fostering entrepreneurial growth in Moore County through incubators and accelerators similar in scope to Bull City Forward, Queen City Forward, and the American Underground.

Our committee kicked-off back in May and with Forward Communities guidance began answering a questionnaire to fill in the blanks of what we needed to make any entrepreneurship initiative work in Moore County. The questions are broken down into four areas: Build, Enable, Measure, and Advocate. Building a talent pipeline; enabling the entrepreneurship environment; measuring impact of our initiatives; advocating strong relationships with regulators and entrepreneurs.

After bringing in community leaders and members into the fold we broke down into working groups to tackle specific aspects of the feasibility of driving entrepreneurship in our community. I currently am chairing the Enable Working Group along with four other members of our steering committee. We will be working on the β€˜Enable’ part of the process and expect in the next month to have answered all the Enable questions, identified the key assets to enable the entrepreneur environment, and drafted a best practices implementation to move forward.