An Economic Development Success Formula: Connect Smart, Independent, and Weird People and Let Them Do Their Thing

If you want to spawn new businesses, concentrate many smart, independent, and weird people in a relatively small place. Do you want proof that this works? Look at Boulder, Colorado.

“Boulder is a phenomenal example of what you would define as a creative class city. While it’s small (only [about] 100,000 people, it has an extremely high concentration of smart people,” thanks largely to the University of Colorado, national research labs, a “hippie/creative accepting culture dating back to the 1960s, and many decades of independent entrepreneurial thinkers,” author Brad Feld told The Atlantic Cities’ Richard Florida in a 2012 interview. Field wrote, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.

Source: Innovation Management

Getting smart, independent, and weird people in one place creates “a beautiful recipe for an incredibly entrepreneurial community,” Field added.  Although many of these people come out of the universities, they create entrepreneurial sparks when they bump into each other, revealing an intricate pattern of social webs and networks. “Startup communities are networks with all of the participants as nodes in the network, connecting them together,” Feld explained.

Networks carry the day. “A university is a great input into a startup community, but it can’t be the leader, or controller of it.” Unlike networks, universities are hierarchical. “In a startup community, if you have hierarchies trying to lead, or control, you’ll have failure because of the long term goals and motivations are so fundamentally different.”

Universities can help build networks, but shouldn’t run them. They can act as “conveners for entrepreneurial activity, attracting smart new people to the community, spinning off research into companies, and building bridges between students and the startup community. But if the entrepreneurs rely on the university to lead the startup community, there will be disappointment.”