Ecosystem Dashboard

The growth and development of entrepreneurs and small business owners are critical to understanding economic growth in Fort Worth and Tarrant County. Measuring our entrepreneurial ecosystem can be difficult but it is also key to understanding gaps in the resources available for the economic drivers in our city. Plus, measuring our ecosystem allows us to track progress over time.

By looking at a variety of standardized entrepreneurial ecosystem metrics,, we can analyze the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Fort Worth/Tarrant County and see how our ecosystem compares to other cities in Texas and nationally.

At Sparkyard, we view this complex task through three simple lenses: funding, jobs, and rankings.

We chose to display these specific metrics on our dashboard as a comprehensive overview of the main message: entrepreneurs and small business owners contribute an outsized share to economic development through job creation, innovation, and solutions to complex problems. Yet Fort Worth lacks many of the resources to help and encourage these people to launch and grow their companies here.

In addition to the three primary lenses, Sparkyard is pioneering new metrics that help create a more well-rounded view of our ecosystem, including first-of-their-kind measurements on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEl), and topophilia (love of the place).

Keep in mind that we use data from a wide variety of sources, which are indicated under each chart. There is a significant data lag for some sources, which means the most recently available data could be one to two years behind the current year.