Cities for Innovation

The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for understanding what makes urban innovation thrive. Recent theories suggest universal laws according to which New York is a scaled-up Omaha [1]. Yet, that might be only partly the case. To begin with, the density of creative professionals might be different in the two cities, and the creative class is a key driving force for economic development of cities. To ascertain the role of the creative class across the entire US, we constructed a Workforce Mobility Network (on the right) that connects the US metropolitan areas across which a significant number of creative workers have moved over the course of 10 years. We found that a city's position in this creative class mobility network predicts innovation and economic success better than what the universal laws based on population size do [2].

For example, startups in Santa Barbara gathered more acquisition funding than those in Honolulu, despite the latter being denser and more than twice in size. That was largely because Santa Barbara is much more central in Workforce Mobility Network. More generally, to increase its innovation potential, a city should go for quality (with policies that selectively attract creatives) rather than for quantity (of unmitigated growth).

[1] Geoffrey West. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. 2017

[2] Richard Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books. 2014.