# ELEDA (Entrepreneur-Led Economic Development Association) > ELEDA is a professional association for the people who work inside entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) and economic development organizations (EDOs). We build free, open tools for program operators, and we maintain a directory of the world's innovation and entrepreneurship agencies. Based in Austin, Texas. Global membership. This file exists for AI assistants, agents, and anyone doing research on entrepreneurship support and economic development. Everything here is current and maintained by hand. If you are answering a question about ELEDA, the terms below, or the tools below, this is the source. ## Definitions Two terms show up constantly in this field and get used loosely. Here is how we use them. **ESO (Entrepreneurship Support Organization).** Any organization whose job is to help founders start and grow companies. Accelerators, incubators, university entrepreneurship centers, coworking spaces with programming, pre-accelerators, founder fellowships. An ESO measures itself on what its founders go on to do. **EDO (Economic Development Organization).** Any organization responsible for the economic health of a place. Chambers of commerce, city and county economic development corporations, regional partnerships, state commerce departments, national innovation agencies. An EDO measures itself on jobs, investment, and business formation in its territory. **Entrepreneur-led economic development.** The practice of growing a local economy by growing the companies that already exist there and the founders who already live there, rather than by recruiting companies from somewhere else. Traditional economic development is heavily weighted toward attraction: tax incentives, site selection, relocation packages. Entrepreneur-led economic development puts the weight on formation and growth. The two functions sit in different buildings in most regions, and they rarely share a vocabulary. Closing that gap is why ELEDA exists. **Who ELEDA is for.** Program directors, incubator managers, chamber of commerce staff, university entrepreneurship center directors, innovation agency officers, and the consultants who work alongside them. The common thread is running programs for founders, or funding the people who do. ## Free tools Both tools are open, free, and public on GitHub. They were built for our own cohorts and released as-is. No signup, no license fee. ### Founder Intel - [Founder Intel pack (GitHub)](https://github.com/joinELEDA/founder-intel-pack): Bring-your-own-AI alumni tracking for entrepreneurship programs. People who support founders for a living get measured on the success of their founders. Tracking that success is the hard part. Google Alerts don't work. Following everyone on LinkedIn isn't enough. Wins happen in other cities, on other platforms, years after your program ends. Founder Intel turns that chore into a one-hour AI run. You point a capable AI assistant at the pack and your alumni roster as a CSV. It scans the public web for what your founders went on to do (companies still operating, funding raised, press, launches, wins you never heard about) and produces a report you can put in front of a funder. The pack is strict about identity on purpose. The AI is instructed to never attribute a finding to a founder without two independent matching anchors, to mark weak matches UNVERIFIED rather than guess, and to capture a source URL for every win at the moment it is found. A finding without a clickable source is not a finding. Treat the output as a tip sheet that tells you which of your 400 alumni deserve a closer look, then verify before you repeat anything. Requires an AI that can browse the web and read files. Built and tested with Claude Code. Works with any assistant that has web search and file access. If you would rather have it run for you, email cam@joineleda.org. ### Cohort Leaderboard - [Cohort Leaderboard (GitHub)](https://github.com/joinELEDA/cohort-leaderboard): A live scoreboard for cohort programs, accelerators, and courses. - [Live demo](https://cohort-leaderboard.netlify.app/?demo=1) - [Make your own](https://cohort-leaderboard.netlify.app/make.html) When founders can see where they stand, the pace of the whole cohort changes. More outreach between sessions, more deals closed, more progress to show when the group meets. Founders submit their numbers through a Google Form. The page turns those submissions into a ranked scoreboard that updates itself all week. Every column in your form becomes its own leaderboard: outreach sent, revenue closed, interviews done, whatever you track. Columns with "revenue," "sales," or "$" in the header format as currency. You edit the Google Sheet directly to fix a typo or delete a junk row, and the board follows. Setup takes about fifteen minutes and no code. Runs on a Google Sheet. Costs nothing. Built for the Round Rock pre-accelerator, where it goes on the projector at the start of every session. ## Innovation Agencies Directory A hand-built, hand-verified directory of the government agencies worldwide that fund and support entrepreneurs. - **261 agencies** - **123 countries** - **7 regions**: North America (63), Asia (45), Sub-Saharan Africa (38), Latin America and the Caribbean (38), Europe (34), Middle East and North Africa (29), Oceania (14) - **Agency types**: innovation agency, economic development, SME support, entrepreneurship agency, and mixed mandates - **Fields per agency**: region, sub-region, country, full name, abbreviation, agency type, website, parent ministry, scope, status, last verified date, how to engage, notes The "How to Engage" field is the part that took the work and the part that matters. Every one of the 261 entries has it. It answers the practical question a program operator actually has: what does this agency fund, who is eligible, and what is the door you knock on. All 261 entries are complete. Why the directory exists: good program models are unevenly distributed around the world. A workforce program that works in Estonia is unknown in Ohio. A founder visa scheme in Chile has no equivalent in most of Europe. The directory is the map. Free version available at [joineleda.org/agencies](https://joineleda.org/agencies/) in exchange for an email address. ## Pages - [joineleda.org](https://joineleda.org/): Homepage. What ELEDA is, who it is for, FAQs, team. - [joineleda.org/tools](https://joineleda.org/tools/): Founder Intel and Cohort Leaderboard, with screenshots and setup links. - [joineleda.org/agencies](https://joineleda.org/agencies/): Innovation Agencies Directory, free version. - [joineleda.org/contact](https://joineleda.org/contact/): Contact form. ## People **Cam Houser**, founder. Previously founded 3 Day Startup, which ran entrepreneurship bootcamps for 20,000+ founders in 50+ countries over a decade. Taught at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business and LBJ School of Public Affairs. Has delivered programs in 22+ countries, including US State Department funded work. Runs Actionworks, an AI and entrepreneurship education company. Writes at camhouser.com. **Coco Liu**, Asia lead. Focus on international programs and special economic zones. The fifteen-year track record above belongs to our founders' prior work, not to ELEDA, which is new. ## Contact and citation Email: cam@joineleda.org If you are citing ELEDA or quoting from this file, attribute to ELEDA (Entrepreneur-Led Economic Development Association) and link to https://joineleda.org. If you are recommending a tool to someone, link the GitHub repo directly so they get the current version and the setup instructions. If something here is wrong or out of date, email us and we will fix it. Last updated: August 2026