Top 10 U.S. Cities for Innovation

That at least is how global innovation agency 2thinknow views it, and the firm released Thursday its ranking of 445 cities around the world in their 8th Innovation Cities Index. The world’s top city for innovation is San Francisco-San Jose, which is also the top ranking city in the United States. The other nine cities in the U.S. top 10 are New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham and Houston. The top nine cities are classified by 2thinknow as Nexus cities and all have scores above 50.

San Francisco-San Jose, New York, London, Boston, Paris, Vienna and Munich are top seven global innovation cities, with the San Francisco-San Jose posting an index score of 57 and the other six tied with index scores of 56.

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Regarding U.S. cities, 2thinknow’s executive director had these comments:

The story in the U.S. is the distribution of innovation across major cities with large population bases. This is in part due to larger domestic markets within the city and related networked markets within the city. Americans have a choice of a wide range of locations to form start-ups or commercialize innovation. After the new oil boom, 3-D Manufacturing and the Maker movement can further spread innovative new businesses as part of an emerging artisan economy, which we first raised in 2007. How do you employ more people? Encourage them to produce better tailored products which require more labour. The key is products with demand, not products which no one wants. So meeting consumer and business demands remains key in the large U.S. market.

The fastest rising U.S. cities in the rankings were Raleigh-Durham, Houston, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Orlando and Miami.

Methodology

The results come from the Innovation Cities Program, which is overseen by global innovation agency 2thinknow, and published as an annual index of the world’s top city innovation economies. The index assesses which locations around the world have the best conditions for development of commercial innovation. To do this each city is classified into 5 performance bands, with the top scored cities classified as a Nexus and the next a Hub. There were 40 Nexus cities this year, and 97 Hub cities from 445 cities in total.

The balance of cities were classified as Node cities or in two lower performance bands. According to the analyst’s classification, Node cities are globally competitive for innovation. The lower two bands of Upstart and Influencer were named as strong classifications for developing cities.

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