Why Riyadh and Saudi Arabia Are Rapidly Becoming a Global Startup Powerhouse
Wednesday, 17 December 2025
Riyadh didn’t become a startup ecosystem overnight. It’s rooted in a long history of adaptation and reinvention; a story about shifting from desert trade routes and tribal politics to oil wealth and now trying to crack the code on innovation-led diversification. To understand why Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh startups in particular, is increasingly attractive to
- Published in Regional Development
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Chicago Startups Industrialized Innovation
Thursday, 11 December 2025
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
New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital
Monday, 08 December 2025
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
- Published in Regional Development
Why Startup Ecosystems Fail at Scale: The Economic Development Playbook for Capacity Building
Friday, 05 December 2025
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
- Published in Economic Development
Thailand: The Startup Ecosystem Rising from Centuries of Ingenuity
Friday, 21 November 2025
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
- Published in Regional Development
Put a Bow on your Startup Ecosystem
Friday, 31 October 2025
If startup ecosystems were a fashion statement, most cities would look like clip on necktie that everyone admires for the good intention of dressing it up. In reality, we’ve overserved accelerators that don’t accelerate, misunderstood venture studios as glorified R&D departments, push university IP commercialization on a market that doesn’t want to license, and host
- Published in Startup Ecosystems
Startup Investors, Let’s Get to Know Portland, Oregon
Wednesday, 29 October 2025
If cities were startups, Portland would be the one that never hired a PR firm, preferring instead to let its product (culture) speak for itself. For investors, that confidence has been both its charm and a challenge. Portland is inventive to the point of eccentricity, independent to the point of obstinacy, and so allergic to
- Published in Regional Development







