“What is Canopy?” a question I get asked a lot and surprisingly it has been very hard to answer over the last couple of years as we have been on a journey of emergent strategy since establishing in Somerville, MA in 2016.

We’ve been finding our place in the world, trying things, adapting and moving forward to a place where we seem now to be able to answer things better than ever. So it’s time to put a marker in the ground, and at the encouragement of the #tribe here is how we feel Canopy is going to make its mark on the world over the next few years.

Our Purpose

Canopy exists to support entrepreneurs and innovators on their life-long journey.

Our Mission

Our mission is to boost start-up ecosystems, not focusing on numbers, but on mindset and values. Not focusing on business metrics but rather on connections and cooperation. We create massive value by building a strong community at the core of the ecosystem.

This is why we love to help emerging cities to evolve their start-up ecosystems and to quickly establish the resources they need to thrive. (Think about cities like Aveiro, Plymouth, Bhopal or Brockton MA.)

We strive to help these ecosystems grow with these core roots in place:

• A positive, sustainable and supportive culture

• Diversity as a core strength and pillar of the ecosystem

• Mechanisms that promote self learning and evolution as an ecosystem, as well as for individuals

• Connections to more established ecosystems and a global community of likeminded people, and the opportunities therein.

As these communities come together we will stimulate and challenge them to think about some of the most difficult problems in our society, putting the collective startup and innovation thinking to work for the benefit of humanity.

Through these efforts we strive to create positive impact on local, regional, national and global levels.

Our values

At the core of how we are as a community are these values:

• Openness is how we all win - we collaborate with everyone in the ecosystem, for the betterment of all. We are open to dialogue and opportunity. We are not however the instrument of any one organisation. We remain independent and balanced at all times.

• Diversity is strength - Diversity in views, skills, experience, gender, race and backgrounds are all strengths in our community. We believe in blending together these strengths to make effective teams and to bring success for everyone. We believe in the energy that comes from this diversity and we seek it out everywhere we go. We support each person in our community in being who they are, and building ecosystem communities that reflect their regional identities and those of the people that make them.

• Consistent and persistent - When we commit to something we do it. We know this is at the heart of change and adoption. We strive to deliver to the best of our abilities in everything we do and to keep improving. We seek input from others to make things work and we hold each other to account for our parts of the mission.

• We learn, we don’t fail - We know things don’t always go right. We know things we try our hardest at don’t always work. We also know that we are people, and that people have flaws and we recognise that timing in life has a lot to do with what we see of those people when we work with them. Throughout this we look to succeed in everything that we do, but where we don’t reach that mark we proactively learn from it. We embrace the moment for the opportunity to be better next time, and to support others around us to do the same.

• Celebrate our community - Life cannot have enough celebrations in it! We celebrate the win! We celebrate the learning moment! We celebrate our time together as a community and value the energy it creates for us all.