Entrepreneurship is back to cities, the evidence is clear, the action is no longer in tech clusters, but in the middle of cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, London or Berlin.
The ones that are not fully convinced of this transformation may take a look at the data. Martin Prosperity Institute whose director is Richard Florida released last year a study called “Startup City” that shows this trend of venture capital shifting from clusters in the outskirts of cities to metro areas.
Even further, together with seemingly traditional startups that Florida describes in his study we can find new forms and spaces of work such as co-working spaces, new ways of learning like Developer Bootcamps and MOOCs and new forms of incubation such as accelerators. All these three elements configure not only a changing landscape for the startup process and the policies that support it but also challenge our understanding of the concept of work.
Industry clusters were introduced in the 90’s by Michael Porter in his book The Competitive Advantage of Nations. Since then, the idea of cluster has dominated policy. Do these new developments mean that the concept of clusters and its resulting policies are now outdated? and if so, what are the implications?