The global economic landscape has changed dramatically during the past several years. The number of regions around the world that have the skills and capabilities to compete in science and technology-based industries has grown, offering leading companies numerous options for where they locate facilities or source their products.

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise entrepreneurial returns, thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs. A second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of entrepreneurship. Evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for entrepreneurship rationale.

We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top 1% of US inventions for a technology during 1975–1984 in terms of subsequent citations. Patenting growth is significantly higher in cities and technologies where breakthrough inventions occur after 1984 relative to peer locations that do not experience breakthrough inventions.

As the world struggles to emerge from economic recession, national, regional, and local governments are seeking new, cost-effective ways to stimulate growth and job creation. One of the most interesting strategies is the development of economic clusters of innovation. Traditionally, these clusters have been defined by specific geographies and colocation. The Cisco® Internet Business Solution Group (IBSG) hypothesizes that with the advent of new communication and collaboration technologies, geography need not be the overriding factor for a successful cluster.

Innovation is the critical component of long-term economic prosperity, driving productivity growth and (if spread across key sectors of the economy) ensuring broad-based economic growth. Sparking innovation, however, requires capital (which is threatened by the current economic downturn), skilled-labor, scientific and technological advances, and creative collaboration between government and the private sector. Innovation cannot be dictated, but it can be cultivated.

Twenty years after Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter introduced the concept to the policy community and 10 years after its wide state adoption, clusters—geographic concentrations of interconnected firms and supporting or coordinating organizations—have reemerged as a key tool and rubric in Washington and in the nation’s economic regions. 
 

The Startup Genome, in partnership with Telefónica Digital, engaged more than 50,000 startups across the world to understand where, outside of the proven testing ground of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship takes hold. Simultaneous with a global explosion of entrepreneurship has been a burst of new startup ecosystems around the world, and a newfound maturity in others. While Silicon Valley is still the world's largest and most influential start-up ecosystem, flourishing communities in other U.S.

Silicon Valley has long been regarded as the prime breeding ground for high-tech startups, but rapid exchange and commercialization of ideas and technology has recently revealed a number of cities worldwide that have also become successful startup incubators over the past decade. Click on the graphic below for an enlarged look at what makes the top 20 cities so successful. 

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Cleantech researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives, and policy-makers across New England are driving economic growth, stimulating creation of new jobs and businesses, and protecting the environment by enabling development of new and innovative clean technologies. A series of recent studies have characterized the economic importance of cleantech at the state level, but there has not been a regional analysis of the cleantech innovation cluster in New England.

In 2013, the United States economy appeared to have at last emerged from the hangover of the Great Recession, with economic indicators picking up across the board and stock markets roaring ahead. For good reason, there is a great deal of optimism regarding economic growth. At the same time, perils lurk and several long-term challenges give cause for economic pessimism.