New Startup Ecosystems and the Innovation Hub
In this chapter, we outline the attributes and mechanisms for building an innovation hub that can be the center of the innovation ecosystem. Innovation hubs are not simply an accelerator, as many suppose. Instead it combines elements of a mature innovatio
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New Startup Ecosystems and the Innovation Hub
Building an Ecosystem Starting a new technology venture is hard. In the absence of help, the vast majority of ventures will fail. Since the early 2000’s one of the ways ventures have gotten that help is Technology Accelerators. Most mature innovation ecosystems are now dense with technology accelerators. Many geographies are investing in technology accelerators as a means to establish an innovation ecosystem. Accelerators should be a part of an overall strategy to support an innovation ecosystem but establishing that innovation ecosystem requires much more. That more is the creation of an innovation hub. For us to industrialize innovation, one thing is extremely clear – we must tap into the untapped potential of populations and inventions outside of the normal geographies and comfortable topics of the current mature innovation ecosystems. We must build innovation ecosystems where there are none currently or where the current system is not fully effective. We define more about legacy innovation ecosystems below, but these are based in the geographies that we have associated for years with innovation, like Silicon Valley and the MIT area of Boston. To really deploy innovations into the economy, we must see opportunity outside of areas. This does not necessarily mean a great distance from those areas. What we have observed is that the ability of an innovation ecosystem to support innovation weakens quickly as a function of distance from the core of the legacy innovation ecosystem. Ironically, most of the actual people that make up the working staffs of the startups in the existing new innovation ecosystem live in these outlying regions: they simply cannot afford the cost of housing in the traditional centers. In addition to the outlying regions of traditional innovation centers, there are many large urban areas that have not developed an innovation ecosystem. There can be many reasons for this, however why is less important than the simple fact that there are large populations that containing technologically savvy people available.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. K. Sharma, K. E. Meyer, Industrializing Innovation-the Next Revolution, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12430-4_8
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8 New Startup Ecosystems and the Innovation Hub
They understand how to apply technology in industry, government and science. They simply are not located in an area that creates the great basis for starting ventures. A reasonable question might be “why not build out new innovation ecosystems the same way the old ones were built?” The core issue with that idea is the way legacy innovation ecosystems operate. Within the startup continuum that we discussed in Chap. 6, a startup at the inception stage in a legacy innovation ecosystem relies on the existing elements of that legacy innovation ecosystem to help them. The key part of the legacy innovation ecosystems is the people who have started ventures before or been part of a new startup. The process becomes something like a mediev
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