Skift Take
With the federal government deadlocked in intractable partisan debate, mayors across the U.S. are stepping up to drive progress by cultivating their innovation economies. A growing number are developing innovation districts to elevate their cities' brands.
Mayors across the U.S. are investing significant resources to develop what the Brookings Institution calls “innovation districts,” in an attempt to accelerate urban and economic development, catalyze job growth, and shift their cities' reputations toward being incubators for progress.
These districts are also providing a new type of idea collision space during meetings and conferences for visiting organizations to engage local tech and creative thought leaders in different growth industries.
According to the House of Logistics & Mobility in Frankfurt: "The city of the future is an interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine." Innovation districts, then, are designed to be the engine powering the machine.
But what are they exactly? You can’t always see innovation districts physically in their entirety, beyond the buildings they inhabit, anymore than you can “see” Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, although people are attempting to do just that.
Rather, like Silicon Valley, innovation districts are a packaged network of public and private organizations intentionally located in close proximity for the purpose of sharing knowledge generated across a wide range of fields.
Another example of the concept in action is Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard and MIT are surrounded by a vibrant startup community and hyper-caffeinated neighborhoods full of creative spaces for brainy people. Much of the city is basically one big creative space that benefits from the convergence of multidisciplinary research and development within its environs, far exceeding the sum of its parts.
Innovation districts come in a variety of forms, and not every neighborhood with a couple co-working spaces should be defined as such. So for our purposes here, we need a working definition covering the broad strokes.
In a nutshell: Innovation districts are defined geographic clusters consisting of academic and scientific research institutions, startup and enterprise companies, and business incubators located in amenity-rich, mixed-use urban cores. Representing a new platform for economic development, they provide a highly networked ecosystem designed to accelerate growth across a region’s scope of creative and advanced industry sectors.
Now imagine copying that vision, resembling the Silicon Valley and Cambridge model, and plunking it down in Middle America.
That's exactly what many U.S. mayors, including Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke, are at
