While on the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem panel at the Sandbox Summit, Derek Weber from goBrandgo! in Missouri shared a story.  His story was about the creation of an “official” St. Louis entrepreneurial portal – with all entrepreneurial events, organizations and resources in one place.  Tens of thousands of dollars, an RFP and several months later, there is a beautiful site that no one uses.

Not long after, Derek visited Portland, Oregon for a series of meetings with entrepreneurial instigators there.  Separately, each one mentioned that they use Calagator, a unified events calendar for Portland.  Ugly but everyone uses it.  “It looked like something someone put up over a weekend, probably because they did.”  But everyone used it.

This is not something a government organization could have built – too ugly, too grassroots. Lesson learned — governments and big business have a reputation to uphold.  Ugly and built over a weekend doesn’t work for them.

In the Boston market there are quite a few websites that offer access to the resources available to entrepreneurs and innovators.  No single site offers everything so you might need to make the rounds to find what you need.  Here’s our January 2011 list of those sites and individual organizations.  Probably time for an update – we’ll work on that and post one sometime in the next few weeks..