Long time commenter and guest post contributor Rod Stevens, a real estate and economic development consultant at Business Street, joins me for the inaugural podcast of 2019 to talk about the overlooked opportunities in high tech industrial economic development. People tend to think of high tech as software or biotech, but there's often an under-the-radar high tech economy already in place in the overlooked industrial businesses of many communities. We talk about what these businesses are, where they are located, what they need, and why … [Read more...]

Indianapolis Monthly magazine just ran an interesting feature article on Gwendolyn Rogers, proprietor of a local store called the Cake Bake Shop. I have never been to it and am not the target market. But I thought there were a few interesting elements to it that are relevant not just to marketing businesses but cities. Rogers is not an Indianapolis native. She spent time living in Los Angeles and Idaho before arriving there. She had worked for a modeling agency in LA and her husband worked in the film industry. Perhaps because they both … [Read more...]

A couple of folks had interesting counterpoints to the superstar effect. Neil Strickland gave me permission to post the following email he sent: I wonder if you've read, or if I've referred to, the Santa Fe Institute's highly cited 2007 paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) called "Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the pace of life in cities." Its work was in "deriving growth equations which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference … [Read more...]

There was some debate about why state boundaries, which seem irrelevant in many ways as they don't reflect real economic geographies (or often even cohesive communities) and are only sometimes on natural boundaries. Here again is are the 50 "Facebook States of America" from the NYT piece I posted last week. A lot of people went straight to the state university system as a reason for this. The argument is that people go in-state because it's cheaper, and this creates Facebook networks. That's probably some of it but the state … [Read more...]

I recently revisited Bloomington, Indiana (home of Indiana University, my alma mater) and Charlottesville, VA (home of the University of Virginia). They got me thinking about college towns, so I pulled some data for various of them in this size class.  These are communities roughly in the 125,000-250,000 population range that are home to major flagship (or similar) universities. I have 11 on my list. For this size class of community, I believe the best unit of analysis is the county. These are metro areas and can have outlying counties. But … [Read more...]