Silicon Valley, according to a new Milken Institute report on North America’s high-tech regions. But Seattle, Cambridge, and D.C. are among the nation’s leading high-tech hot spots. The report also charts the tech turnarounds in Rustbelt regions like Kalamazoo, Michigan and Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, as well as documenting the rise of leading high-tech regions in Canada and Mexico. Here’s the top ten.
| Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | San Jose – Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 100.0 |
| 2 | 3 | Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA | 46.4 |
| 3 | 2 | Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA | 45.2 |
| 4 | 5 | Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 41.8 |
| 5 | 4 | Los Angeles – Long Beach – Glendale, CA | 40.2 |
| 6 | 6 | Dallas – Plano – Irving, TX | 21.8 |
| 7 | 7 | San Diego – Carlsbad – San Marcos, CA | 19.3 |
| 8 | 11 | Santa Ana – Anaheim-Irvine, CA | 17.7 |
| 9 | 9 | New York – White Plains – Wayne, NY-NJ | 16.8 |
| 10 | 8 | San Francisco – San Mateo-Redwood City, CA | 16.1 |
Outside the U.S., the report finds that:
- Toronto, ON jumped 10 places from 2003, showing impressive gains in building and attracting high-tech businesses in manufacturing and reproducing of optical media, biopharmaceuticals, and medical and diagnostic laboratories.
- Baja California has become a key manufacturing center for high-tech giants such as Casio, Honeywell, Sanyo, and Sony. The state finished in second place in 2003, just after San Jose, in the ranking for manufacturing of semiconductors and other electronic components. It also leads North America in medical equipment and supplies manufacturing.
- Vancouver, BC showed the greatest rise among the top-10 metros for software publishing, climbing from 14th place in 2003 to ninth place in 2007.
My colleague Charlotta Mellander compared these Milken high-tech rankings with our own regional demographic measures for the top 50 U.S. and Canadian metros and found significant correlations to:
- Economic Output: Measured as gross metropolitan product per person (0.475).
- Talent: The Creative Class (0.46),Super-creatives (0.34), and Human Capital – percent of population with a BA and above (0.3).
- Openness and Tolerance: The Mosaic Index – a measure of openness to foreign-born people (0.45); and also to the Gay Index (0.315) when San Jose – the extreme outlier – is excluded from the analysis.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I don’t know what other start-ups are in those regions, but I feel like Madison, WI should be on the list. Granted, we’re known more for our bio-tech more than our high-tech, but I work for the start-up Alice.com and I can really see others flocking here as a result in a year or two.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] Check out the Creative Class Post here [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
[...] was sent a link to this article on a recent ranking of hot technology spots across the country. Not too much of a surprise that [...]
June 6th, 2009 at 5:48 am
The top ten are dominated by California. How is the Californian financial crisis impacting this? Anecdotally, Californian high-rollers are moving to Florida. Will they be followed by the high-tech folks?