economic development Archives - Startup Economist

The Smörgåsbord Standard: Sweden Startups and Why the Rest of the World Should Be Taking Notes

Monday, 01 June 2026 by Paul O'Brien

My dad’s side is Irish, and I have leaned into that identity for most of my life. Then André Persson shared an article, and I started thinking about my mom’s side of the family; Swedish emigrants who brought something with them to the United States that I have never fully examined. What exactly did Sweden

Published in Regional Development

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Iowa Startups Built the First Computer in a Basement. Now…

Monday, 18 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

That statement needs to be explained; wasn’t ENIAC in 1945?? Some say Charles Babbage created the concept of a programmable computer in 1822. This is one that doesn’t make the articles of the history of the computer, and it should. Between 1939 and 1942, in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College,

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Published in Regional Development

11 Comments

Time to Double Down on Las Vegas Startups

Wednesday, 06 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Let’s just get this out of the way from the start, with an apology on my part, there is no getting away from the fact that my brain is going to drop gambling words in this article because it’s cute when talking about Las Vegas. I’m sorry. What we’re here for is much more serious,

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Published in Regional Development

29 Comments

San Marcos Startups Sit on Top of Texas’s Biggest Problem

Friday, 01 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Humans have lived in San Marcos, Texas, longer than they have lived almost anywhere else on the continent. An archaeological fact, I might concede we can’t be sure, but that fact doesn’t matter to what got my attention; it should matter to entrepreneurs, investors, and economic development professionals. People have been here for 12,000 unbroken

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Published in Regional Development

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Kansas City Startups: Where the Heartland Builds the Future

Monday, 27 April 2026 by Paul O'Brien

The challenge for Kansas City (to start out with what to fix), isn’t proving it can generate innovation (the evidence for that fills museums and SEC S-1 filings), the challenge is converting a genuinely impressive foundation of history, talent, capital, and civic infrastructure into a repeatable engine for scaling the kind of companies that put

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Published in Regional Development

26 Comments

Baltimore Is Not Waiting for Permission to Be a Startup City

Monday, 06 April 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message, sent from Washington to Baltimore’s Mount Clare Station in 1844, asked, “What hath God wrought?” Nearly two centuries later, Baltimore is still wroughting. The city gave us the first commercial railroad, the first dental school, the bottle cap, the Linotype machine, rubber surgical gloves, and the national anthem has now

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Published in Regional Development

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I Wrote the Book I Needed to Read Twenty Years Ago

Tuesday, 17 March 2026 by Paul O'Brien

There is a moment, somewhere between finishing a manuscript and holding the printed thing in your hands, when you realize the book was never really about the subject. It was about you. Not in the self-indulgent sense, not a memoir dressed up in economics. But in the sense that everything I have spent the last

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Published in Economic Development, Featured, Startup Ecosystems

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