Economic Development Archives - Page 2 of 22

Chicago Startups Industrialized Innovation

Thursday, 11 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

This is a city that burned to the ground and responded by inventing the skyscraper. It turned its geography into the nation’s freight yard, its politics into a machine, and its universities into research engines. It engineered futures markets, modern cellular telephony, and now wants to industrialize quantum computing. If you’re trying to understand how

Published in Regional Development

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New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital

Monday, 08 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

If you still think of New Mexico as a quiet desert between Texas and Arizona, you’re about 80 years behind. This is the state that built the atomic age, test-flew the rockets that defined the Cold War, turned a supposed UFO crash into a tourism engine, and is increasingly the heart of quantum computing. New

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Published in Regional Development

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Why Startup Ecosystems Fail at Scale: The Economic Development Playbook for Capacity Building

Friday, 05 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Cities everywhere are doing a lot for entrepreneurs, often sincerely and impressively, and what I’m finding in city after city is that the greatest opportunity is not in another startup program or even fostering a new investor but building capacity. They are supporting some founders, but not more founders. They are helping some investors, but

economic development economies entrepreneurship startup ecosystems

Published in Economic Development

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There Is No “Era of the Bootstrapped Startup,” There’s Math, Memory Loss, and Better Advice

Tuesday, 02 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Every few years, someone declares a new epoch in entrepreneurship. We’ve had the “Era of Lean,” the “Rise of the Micro-VC,” the “Democratization of Innovation,” and (God help us) the phase where every city believed a coworking space with a yellow logo and a couple late career bankers counted as a “startup ecosystem.” With AI

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Published in Startup Ecosystems, Startups, Uncategorized

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Thailand: The Startup Ecosystem Rising from Centuries of Ingenuity

Friday, 21 November 2025 by Paul O'Brien

A nation whose cultural DNA has been entrepreneurial for over seven hundred years, Thailand startups didn’t just suddenly wake up and decide to build a startup ecosystem because it saw Singapore building skyscrapers to the heavens; traders, artisans, inventors, and diplomats, long before “ecosystem” was a word policymakers could spell, have held Thailand as a

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Published in Regional Development

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New Jersey’s Creative Class Isn’t Just Showing Up, It’s Becoming the Payoff for Its Startup Economy

Wednesday, 05 November 2025 by Paul O'Brien

In a few weeks, I’ll be in New Jersey, a part of the world that holds a very special place in my heart, as does nearby Philadelphia, thanks to family, foundational memories as a child and with my own kids, and now as roots to call a home. With that trip in mind, I could

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Published in Regional Development

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When Markets Learn Faster Than Governments

Tuesday, 04 November 2025 by Paul O'Brien

The debate over “market failure” has raged for decades, rooted in a false premise that the economy should behave like an equation rather than an ecosystem. This isn’t just academic. The idea of ‘market failure’ keeps resurfacing in policy debates over AI, climate, and housing, as if the lessons of the last 25 years never

data government innovation policy regulation

Published in Economic Development

26 Comments