In Sunday's AJC Business section, my colleague Michael Kanell writes how Atlanta Tech Village and Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, among others, are helping local entrepreneurs grow. Kanell's report, "Looking for a Village to Raise Startup Tech Firms," expands on some of the themes discussed at last week's Collaborative Leadership Summit, often, (co) lab.

Here are the first few paragraphs from Michael's story: 

It may take a village to help a start-up company soar.

So say some entrepreneurs, asserting that young companies grow faster and better in a community of peers than they do on their own. As Atlanta struggles to pull away from hard economic times, they say, it needs to nurture its high-wage technology sector.

That was a key point that came out of a two-day conference intended to serve as a forum to jump-start discussions about improving Atlanta. The conference was organized by Leadership Atlanta and brought together about 1,400 business, education and civic leaders. Among the primary sponsors was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The state has great assets, but has underperformed in recent years — producing too few high-paying jobs, said Airwatch chairman Alan Dabbiere, speaking at the Collaborative Leadership Summit, often referred to as (co) lab, held last week in Atlanta.

“In the 1990s, we had a kind of swagger,” Dabbiere said. “We need to get it back.”

Conference speakers agreed that the region needs better primary education and more efficient transportation – challenges that mean political struggle. More capital for start-ups also is needed, an obstacle that mostly means buffing Atlanta’s image as a place where investments will pay off.

But when it comes to their own work in building the economy, some entrepreneurs said that, more than anything else, they need each other.

Atlanta Tech Village opened early this year in a 27-year-old Buckhead building purchased late last year by entrepreneur David Cummings. The five-floor building is now home to 106 companies – many of them one- and two-person firms and most of them software-centered.

The idea is to get an intense kind of interaction, collaboration and mutual support that is good for all the companies, Cummings said. “It’s really a community center for entrepreneurs.”

Also mentioned in the article: Devon Wijesinghe, CEO of InsightPool, Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft, Tim Lee, chairman of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, Sanjay Parekh, founder previously of Digital Envoy and now CEO of Startup Riot and Stephen Fleming, vice president of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, which operates the Advanced Technology Development Center.

Go to MyAJC.com for full story.