Growing Grant County: Entrepreneurship-Led Growth - Fostering an Ecosystem Where Businesses Thrive
Something is happening in the American small-business landscape that should matter deeply to everyone invested in Grant County’s future.
New business formations have reached historic levels nationally, driven in part by economic pressure that is pushing more Americans to build something of their own rather than wait for someone else to create an opportunity. That instinct, to make rather than wait, is exactly the kind of entrepreneurial energy that research consistently shows is the most durable driver of local job growth.
The research on this point is unambiguous. Urban economists at Harvard, studying U.S. cities over two decades, found that initial levels of entrepreneurship, measured by the share of employment in new firms and the prevalence of smaller, independent businesses, are among the strongest predictors of long-term employment growth. The implication for places like Grant County is direct: the more fertile the ground for new businesses, the stronger the long-run economic trajectory.
But ground does not become fertile on its own. It requires intentional cultivation. It requires what practitioners call an entrepreneurial ecosystem: the interlocking web of knowledge, networks, capital, and physical spaces that together determine whether a new business idea has a real chance of becoming a viable business.
In Grant County, that ecosystem is forming. Our job is to build and support it deliberately, equitably, and with the sequenced discipline that turns promising pieces into a functioning system.
A Warning from Economic History, and What It Means for Us
Before describing what Grant County has and where we need to go, it is worth pausing on a lesson from economic history that carries direct relevance for manufacturing communities.
Economists call it the Chinitz hypothesis, after Benjamin Chinitz’s landmark 1961 study comparing New York and Pittsburgh. Chinitz observed that New York’s economic resilience traced back to its garment industry, a sector with low barriers and many small, independent operators who trained generations of entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh, by contrast, was organized around large steel companies. The result, Chinitz argued, was that Pittsburgh produced company men, not entrepreneurs. That culture persisted for generations after the steel industry declined.
The lesson is not that manufacturing is bad for a community. It is not. Grant County’s manufacturing base, represented by companies like Prysmian, Atlas Foundry, Cafe Valley, Earthwise Plastics, and others recognized at our 2026 Economic Impact Appreciation Awards, is one of our most important economic assets. The lesson is that communities must intentionally cultivate entrepreneurship alongside their anchor employers and not assume it will happen automatically. Without that intentionality, the culture tilts toward employment rather than ownership, toward stability rather than risk, and the ecosystem for new business formation quietly atrophies.
Grant County is not Pittsburgh. But the warning is instructive: the time to build an entrepreneurial culture is before you need it, not after.
What Grant County Already Has
The good news is that we are not starting from zero. At our 2026 Economic Impact Appreciation Awards and Local Elected Officials (LEO) Dinner, we recognized 57 businesses responsible for more than $200 million in regional investment and more than 160 jobs created. That is not a side story. That is evidence of a business community that is actively growing.
Our entrepreneurial ecosystem assets are real, if still maturing.
Support and advising: The East Central Indiana Small Business Development Center (ISBDC), housed within our partnership with the ISBDC, provides no-cost business advising and training to entrepreneurs at every stage, from concept through growth and eventual transition. The ISBDC network serves all 92 Indiana counties, and our local relationship with the ISBDC team gives Grant County entrepreneurs a direct, trusted guide into the full range of state and federal resources available to them.
Capital tools: The Growth Council administers revolving loan funds that provide access to capital for businesses that may not yet qualify for conventional financing. The CHARM Grant, as funds are available, provides matching funds for exterior upgrades and beautification to make a place more “charming” and approachable.
Education and training: Through our partnership with the ISBDC, we co-host the Grant County Small Business Workshop Series, including sessions on branding, marketing, and goal setting designed for the practical realities of running a business in a community like ours. We are also developing a workshop series to offer entrepreneurship education that meets people where they are; one that may include personal strengths assessment, peer learning, and entrepreneurial community connections. Additionally, we are realigning with the City of Marion, which is launching a new initiative this year to expand entrepreneurial opportunities and access across Grant County.
Regional connections: Grant County sits within a broader East Central and Northeast Indiana ecosystem that includes Elevate Ventures, which has supported more than 428 Indiana startups with more than $120 million in investment and catalyzed over a billion dollars in follow-on capital statewide. While most of that investment has concentrated in larger metros, that infrastructure is accessible to Grant County entrepreneurs who are positioned to compete for it.
What is still developing is the connective tissue that turns these individual pieces into a functioning system, and that is the focus of the work ahead.
Three Ecosystem Components: A Map
A functioning entrepreneurial ecosystem is not a single program or a single office. It is a system of interdependent components that reinforce each other. Our analysis identifies three components where intentional investment in Grant County will have the most leverage.
Component 1: Culture and Networks
Culture is the hardest ecosystem element to build and the most consequential. Research consistently shows that entrepreneurial intention, the belief that starting a business is both desirable and feasible, is shaped by the social environment as much as by individual aptitude. When entrepreneurship is visible, celebrated, and normalized, more people try it. When it is invisible or associated primarily with risk and failure, fewer people do.
Grant County’s entrepreneurial culture is practical and grounded. As we have said before, entrepreneurship here is measured in long hours, careful decisions, and the quiet determination to build something that lasts. That is a genuine strength. The opportunity is to make that culture more visible, to amplify the stories of local business owners in ways that inspire the next generation of founders.
The network infrastructure supports culture. In Grant County, the Growth Council convenes with partners across sectors. The Greater Grant County Chamber provides business networking and advocacy. Indiana Wesleyan University, Taylor University, and Ivy Tech Marion all have roles to play as connectors of students, talent, and business knowledge. The Small Business Workshop Series presented by Indiana SBDC eCenter creates structured touchpoints where aspiring entrepreneurs can find each other, not just find information.
The gap we need to close is a formalized mentorship layer: a structured program matching experienced local business owners with early-stage entrepreneurs, with regular touchpoints, accountability, and the kind of trust-based guidance that no workshop can fully substitute. The goal is not to have more events. The goal is to have more relationships.
Component 2: Capital Access
Capital is the ecosystem component that attracts the most attention and deserves the most honesty. The reality in Grant County, and across most of East Central Indiana, is that the capital landscape is thin at the early and growth stages. Conventional bank loans are available but require collateral and cash flow that early-stage businesses often do not yet have. The revolving loan fund and CHARM Grant help, but their capacity is limited relative to the breadth of need.
What is largely absent is the connective layer between microloans and institutional investment: angel capital. Organized angel investing, in which experienced business owners invest modest amounts in promising local companies and offer hands-on guidance alongside their capital, is one of the highest-leverage tools an ecosystem can develop. Elevate Ventures has demonstrated the model at the state level, generating approximately $47 in economic return for every dollar invested. The question is how to bring that logic closer to Grant County.
One reason for genuine optimism on this front is the strengthening role of community foundations in Indiana's economic development landscape. Through its long-running Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow initiative, Lilly Endowment has spent decades helping Indiana's community foundations build the capacity and leadership needed to address the real needs of their local communities including, increasingly, economic opportunity. The Community Foundation of Grant County is part of that statewide network, and we are actively engaged in conversations with their team about how philanthropy and economic development can work in closer alignment here. Those conversations are early and the work is theirs to lead, but the energy is real, and we see community foundations as natural and increasingly important partners in closing the capital gaps that public programs alone cannot fill.
In the near term, the most important capital work is making sure every Grant County entrepreneur who is ready for growth capital knows what tools exist: the ISBDC services, Indiana's State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) administered through Indiana’s capital access programs, the Venture Capital Investment Tax Credit for Indiana investors, and the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for innovation-oriented businesses. Awareness is a form of capital access. Many eligible businesses never apply because they do not know to do so.
In the medium term, the region should work toward a coordinated early-stage capital vehicle, potentially structured around a seed fund capitalized through community foundations, local investors, and federal economic development dollars, that keeps promising Grant County companies here rather than forcing them to relocate to access funding.
Component 3: Innovation Spaces
Physical space matters more than it might seem. Entrepreneurship is, in part, a social activity; it happens in conversation, in chance encounters, in the energy of people working on different problems in the same room. Dedicated co-working and incubation spaces create the conditions for those interactions to happen reliably.
The East Central Indiana region has real models to learn from. The Innovation Connector (The IC) in Muncie offers a glimpse of one format. Operated in partnership with Ball State University, the IC offers co-working, training, and mentorship infrastructure that has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs. MadJax, also in Muncie, combines a makerspace and co-working spaces in a community environment that explicitly serves creative and entrepreneurial activity together. These spaces function as physical infrastructure for ecosystem development.
The communities that attract and retain entrepreneurial talent are the ones where that talent can see a place for itself. A dedicated innovation space sends a signal, to other business founders, to investors, and to prospective employers, that the county is serious about its entrepreneurial future.
The Gaps, Named Honestly
An intentional approach to ecosystem development requires naming the gaps as clearly as the assets. In Grant County, the most significant are these:
Limited early-stage risk capital. Beyond the revolving loan fund and CHARM Grant, there is no organized angel network, no local seed fund, and limited access to equity capital for high-growth businesses. Entrepreneurs with promising ideas and real traction often exhaust local options quickly.
Mentorship at scale. Individual mentoring relationships exist, but they are informal, unevenly distributed, and not systematically available to all aspiring entrepreneurs. The ecosystem lacks a structured program that matches mentors with mentees reliably and consistently.
Dedicated innovation infrastructure. Co-working space(s) are still developing, unknown, and disorganized at best. Until further organization and creation of new happens, there is no reliable physical home for the entrepreneurial community of the county; no place where founders can work alongside each other, attend programming for knowledge advancement, and access resources under one roof.
Ecosystem coordination. The individual organizations doing good work - the Growth Council, the ISBDC, Community Foundation of Grant County, Greater Grant County, the universities, the lenders - do not yet operate as a formal ecosystem with shared data, shared goals, and shared accountability. Coordination is the multiplier that makes individual programs more powerful than the sum of their parts.
Broadband and rural reach. Entrepreneurs in the county’s smaller communities, Fairmount, Gas City, Jonesboro, Upland, Converse, Swayzee, and others, face real connectivity and proximity barriers to accessing ecosystem resources that are concentrated in Marion. A full Grant County ecosystem must reach beyond the county seat.
One Inclusion-Focused Action: Making the Ecosystem Work for Everyone
An entrepreneurial ecosystem that works for some of the community is not a fully functional ecosystem. It is a partial one. And partial ecosystems, like partial pipelines, lose pressure.
Research on entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the belief that one is capable of starting and running a business, shows that it is not fixed. It is built through education, mentorship, visible role models, and early experiences of success. That means the entrepreneurial gap between those who start businesses and those who do not is primarily a talent gap. It is an access gap. It is a connection gap. It is a “I didn’t know that was possible for someone like me” gap.
In Grant County, that gap has a specific shape. Women-owned businesses, minority-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses, and businesses founded by residents of the county’s smaller communities are underrepresented in the entrepreneurial support ecosystem relative to their share of the population. The Growth Council’s business directory explicitly surfaces Black- and minority-owned enterprises, a signal of intent. The next step is translating that intent into structured access.
An inclusion-focused initiative for entrepreneur pathways in Grant County could look something like this:
Partnering with trusted community anchors, faith communities, neighborhood associations, the Grant County Family YMCA, Carey Services, and others, to identify and recruit aspiring entrepreneurs who have not yet connected with formal business support resources.
Delivering accessible, community-embedded entrepreneurship workshops in locations and at times that work for people with jobs, families, and transportation constraints. Evening and weekend scheduling. Childcare provided where feasible.
Pairing each participant with a mentor from the business community who reflects something of their background or sector, not because people can only learn from people who look like them, but because representation in mentorship accelerates trust and deepens learning.
Connecting every cohort participant to the CHARM Grant, the revolving loan fund, and ISBDC advising on immediate next steps, so that the training leads directly to resources rather than ending at inspiration.
Measuring outcomes explicitly: share of participants from target populations, business formation rates among cohort graduates, first-year revenue, and employment created.
An initiative like this would create leverage. Every entrepreneur we bring into the ecosystem who would otherwise have been left outside it is a business that creates jobs, generates tax revenue, and deepens the community’s economic resilience. Inclusion is not a cost of doing business. It is a return on investment.
The Sequencing: How This Gets Built
Ecosystem development is not a single intervention. It is a sequence. The order matters because each phase creates the conditions the next phase requires.
In the near term (the next 12–24 months), the priority is foundation-building: formalizing the mentor network that connects experienced local seasoned business owners with early stage entrepreneurs; developing functioning co-working and makers spaces, expanding programming and education for small business owners and entrepreneurs, supporting inclusion-aligned initiatives that are getting off the ground; and maintaining the CHARM grant and revolving loan fund as accessible on-ramps for businesses that need capital to take their next step. We are also working to establish a shared resource map that any Grant County resident can use to navigate the full ecosystem. These actions are achievable with existing relationships and modest new investment.
In the medium term (years two through five), the priority is capital infrastructure: developing an organized early-stage capital vehicle, expanding ISBDC programming capacity throughout the county, cultivating dedicated innovation and co-working spaces through community and partner investments, and building the data systems needed to track ecosystem performance and make the case to outside investors and funders.
In the longer term, the goal is self-reinforcing culture: a Grant County where entrepreneurship is as normal a career aspiration as manufacturing, healthcare, or education; where successful local founders reinvest their time and capital in the next generation of businesses; and where the ecosystem is visible enough, and credible enough, that it shapes how site selectors, talent, and capital think about this community.
What This Means for Site Selectors and Investors
A word directly to the economic development professionals, site selectors, and regional investors reading this series.
The communities that win the competition for talent and investment over the next two decades will not be the ones with the lowest costs or the most available land alone. They will be the ones with the most dynamic economic culture: the places where people can build things, where ideas find support, and where success breeds more success.
The Harvard research on entrepreneurship and urban growth makes this point clear: initial entrepreneurship levels predict long-term employment growth more reliably than many of the factors communities typically compete on. The implication is not that manufacturing doesn’t matter. It does. But manufacturing and entrepreneurship are complements, not substitutes. The communities that attract large employers while simultaneously cultivating local business formation are the ones that develop the deepest economic resilience.
Grant County is building toward that model. The 2026 Economic Impact Awards demonstrate the scale of what our existing business community is already doing. The investments in co-working, mentorship, capital access, and inclusive entrepreneurship programming are the infrastructure that sustains and amplifies that activity for the next generation.
We are not yet where we want to be. But we know where we are going, and we are doing the work.
The Invitation
Building an entrepreneurial ecosystem is not something one organization does alone. It requires business owners who mentor, investors who back local ideas, institutions that open their resources, and community members who choose to buy local, hire local, and invest local.
If you are a Grant County business owner willing to mentor an aspiring entrepreneur, we want to connect you.
If you are an investor interested in the opportunity here, we want to hear your thoughts and share our ideas.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur who has been waiting for a sign that this community is ready to support you, this is it.
Reach us at communications@grantcounty.com or (765) 662-0650. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is being built. Come build it with us.
Resources Shared in this Post
Grant County Economic Growth Council — business resources, CHARM Grant, revolving loan funds: grantcounty.com/grant-county-business
Grant County CHARM Grant — seed funding for community-impact businesses: grantcounty.com/charm
Grant County Revolving Loan Funds: grantcounty.com/revolving-loan-funds
Indiana Small Business Development Center (ISBDC) — no-cost advising, training, financing guidance: isbdc.org
East Central Indiana SBDC — Ecosystem Navigator Zina Bartle: isbdc.org/locations
Indiana Economic Development Corporation — entrepreneur resources, Connect.IN, Venture Capital Investment Tax Credit: iedc.in.gov
Elevate Ventures — Indiana’s statewide seed and venture fund for high-growth startups: elevateventures.com
ISBDC Small Business Workshop Series registration (branding, marketing, goal-setting): isbdc.ecenterdirect.com
Innovation Connector, Muncie — co-working and incubation model, East Central Indiana: innovationconnector.com
Indiana SBDC — Finance Your Business (SSBCI, SBA loans, capital access): isbdc.org/services/finance-your-business
2026 Economic Impact Awards Recap — 57 businesses, $200M+ investment: grantcounty.com/news
Lilly Endowment Inc. — Strengthening Indiana, community foundation grantmaking and community development: lillyendowment.org/our-work/community-development/strengthening-indiana/
Community Foundation of Grant County — connecting people, resources, and causes to promote sustainable impact in Grant County: givetogrant.org