When I ran into Patrick Keefe, the new head of the regional venture capital fund, during Atlantic Innovation Week, the one thing he wanted to talk about was the book he’d just finished, Startup Communities by Brad Feld.

Feld is a serial entrepreneur and a pillar of the startup community in Boulder, Colorado. The recently published book is intended to be a roadmap for the development of entrepreneurial communities – such as the one now developing in Atlantic Canada. It’s been featured widely in tech blogs the past few weeks. Even though Keefe was more impressed with it than I was, it’s worth looking at whether the Atlantic Canadian community is following Feld’s recipe.

Keefe was eager to look at all the components Feld highlights because so many of them apply to what’s happening in our region. Here are Feld’s list of “participants” in a startup community and how we stack up:

Entrepreneurs: Feld stipulates that entrepreneurs have to be the leaders in the community. To be frank, this doesn’t fully apply to us. Our entrepreneurs are tremendous at entrepreneur-ing, and some like Jeff Thompson (UserEvents, Fredericton), Saeed El-Dalahari (SimplyCast, Dartmouth) and Milan Vrekic (TitanFile, Dartmouth) are active community builders. But the prime movers in developing the Atlantic Canadian community are other groups, such as Acoa, East Valley Ventures, Genesis Centre, Innovacorp, Innovation PEI and PropelICT. The main impetus now is coming from investors and mentors in New Brunswick, but government and academia has been critical in the early stages.

Government: Brad Feld holds government in low regard, and takes pains to detail the harm of bad policy without considering that good programs could help develop a startup community. With programs like Irap, Acoa’s Business Development Program and the provincial seed programs, the government is an active partner in developing the community in ways Feld can’t conceive.

Universities: Feld makes a great point that the main benefits of universities, in order of importance, are students, students, professors, research facilities, and industrial liaison offices. More than anything, universities attract people and feed entrepreneurs and staff into the ecosystem.

Investors: Again Feld makes a good point. Every startup community in the world, with rare exceptions, complains about a lack of capital. (Sound familiar?) Given the size of the economy, Atlantic Canada is actually doing well in seed financing, and shares with most other jurisdictions the challenges of follow-on funding.

Mentors: Led by New Brunswick, the region is developing a great network of mentors, and MentorCamp is introducing mentors from other parts of the world to the region’s entrepreneurs. We’re also doing more and doing well in one area Feld highlights: mentoring mentors.

Service Providers: We have all the bases covered here. McInnesCooper in particular is strategically positioning itself to court the startup segment.

Large Companies: This is the weak link in the Atlantic Canadian chain. The region simply lacks a large corporate presence that aids innovation.

So what’s the takeaway from Feld’s book? I felt his analysis was a bad match for Atlantic Canada because he does not recognize that investors and government agencies could be leaders in developing startup communities. Having said that, his descriptions of the networking events in Boulder, organized by entrepreneurs themselves, show that entrepreneurs could do a lot more in this region.

Like the authors of most business books, Feld had enough material for a long magazine article and tried to stretch it to a book-length document. His solution was to invite people he knows – most from Boulder – to write lengthy passages. Some of these are good, especially the passages dealing with Iceland and the Kauffman Foundation.

Overall, the topic of developing startup communities is a fascinating one, especially in this region where so much is being done to build a regional ecosystem. With all due respect to Patrick Keefe, I just thought Brad Feld could have done a lot more with the subject.