What Makes A City Surge?

The best cities for new businesses in America aren’t always the ones you’d expect. Once again, Inc. and innovation policy company Startup Genome crunched the data to identify America’s hottest Surge Cities—and found there’s lots to learn from their successes.

- Leigh Buchanan

Surge Cities, our second annual ranking of choice metro statistical areas for planting and growing companies, is ostensibly about places. But it’s really about people.

For entrepreneurs, what matters is whom you know—also how many you know, how well you know them, how willing they are to help you, and how far you have to go to meet for coffee.

Startup founders with high local connectedness—defined as quality relationships with about 25 other founders, eight investors, and 10 experts—double the revenue growth of those with low connectedness, says Startup Genome, the research and policy organization that is Inc.’s Surge Cities partner. The best way to develop those relationships is through “centers of gravity—places people can meet and build meaningful connections and continue to create value from them,” says Arnobio Morelix, Startup Genome’s chief innovation officer.

Now, cities vying for entrepreneurial parity with San Francisco, New York, and Boston are engineering their own centers of gravity. Commonly labeled innovation districts, these urban campuses pack in startups and mature companies alongside accelerators and co-working facilities; universities and medical centers; coffee shops, food trucks, outdoor spaces—you get the picture. The operating principle is density. Ideally, smart, creative people bounce off one another in serendipitous “creative collisions” that produce new ideas, relationships, and ventures.