Building Moonshots

WAY 48Find Your Cluster: Stealing from the best requires a rich talent pool and knowledge spillover.

About the Way

Countless innovation stories and teams—across generations—have emerged from the ecosystems around certain innovation clusters, such as Boston's Kendall Square or Zurich's Kreis 6. Typically geographically bound, these clusters create economic hot spots where interconnected pools of capital, expertise, and talent accumulate and accelerate the development of new industries and new technologies. Across modern history, there have been hundreds of innovation clusters that, at one point in time, have served as the nexus for new ideas, teams, startups, and a world‐changing business or two. Sometimes the magic may last only a few years, such as San Francisco's SOMA district during the dot‐com era in the late 1990s, or span multiple decades, such as Detroit's auto cluster in the United States.

The size of these clusters varies widely from a lab (e.g., Xerox PARC during the Licklider and Taylor heydays) to a neighborhood or district (e.g., Hollywood) to a city (e.g., Berlin) to a megacity (e.g., Bengaluru) or regional corridor (e.g., Tel Aviv's Silicon Wadi). Just within the United States, The Brookings Institution found roughly 20 city districts that could justify being a cluster with a concentrated mix of “research institutions, mature companies, start‐ups and scale‐ups, co‐working spaces, and supportive intermediaries in close geographic proximity” going into 2020.¹