Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Startups are at the core of everything we do. An individual’s life is a startup that begins at birth. Every city was once a startup, as was every company, every institution, and every project. As humans, we are wired to start things.

Today, we are in the midst of a massive shift from the hierarchical society that has dominated the industrial era to a networked society that has been emergent throughout the information era. The Internet is ushering in a postinformation era, one in which the machines have already taken over and are waiting patiently for us to catch up with them. This postinformation era is one in which man and machine are interwoven.

In this world, the network dominates in both the online and the physical world. Throughout the network are nodes, each of which began as a startup. Nodes are continually emerging, and a rigid, top-down hierarchy no longer dominates. The energy, activity, and innovation in society is diffused across the network and concentrated in unexpected places that often didn’t exist before.

In the physical world, much of this energy, activity, and innovation occur in small geographic regions, which I call “startup communities.” Academics call them “clusters,” and there are several theories about how they were created, what caused them to grow and evolve, and what happened as they matured.

These startup communities are appearing everywhere. They are no longer limited to historically well-known entrepreneurial regions and large ...