Rise of the Startup City: The Changing Geography of the Venture Capital Financed Innovation

Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander
Additional contact information
Richard Florida: University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Global Research Professor at NYU

No 377, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: The prevailing geographic model for high-technology industrial organization has been the “nerdistan,” a sprawling, car-oriented suburb organized around office parks, of which Silicon Valley is the prototypical example. This seems to contradict a basic insight of urban theory, which associates dense urban centers with higher levels of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. Our research examines the geography of recent venture capital finance startups in the United States across metros and within a subset of them by neighborhood and finds compelling evidence that the model is changing. Venture capital investments are clustering in larger, denser urban centers with high levels of human capital, like San Francisco and Lower Manhattan, as well as in walkable suburbs. We suggest that the suburban model might have been an historical aberration, and that innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship are realigning in the same urban centers that traditionally fostered them.

Keywords: Venture capital; investments; start-ups; cities; suburbs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F65 G20 O31 R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2014-10-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-geo, nep-ino and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://static.sys.kth.se/itm/wp/cesis/cesiswp377.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0377

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vardan Hovsepyan ().