Four Coastal Areas Dominate a New Measure of Tech-Company Startup Diversity

Growing regional inequality is one of the most serious problems affecting America today. Perhaps the most pointed example of this worsening winner-take-all geography is the extraordinary concentration of high-tech startups in just a handful of cities and metro regions across the country.

A recent study by Joseph Parilla and Sifan Liu of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program looks at this concentration but adds a new measure: startup complexity. The researchers have created a “Startup Complexity Index” (or SCI) that ranks metros on two dimensions. Startup diversity captures the number of technologies that a region has advantage in, and startup ubiquity measures the number of metro areas that have an advantage in a high-tech field. According to the researchers, these two dimensions represent the frontier of economic development that may serve to compound and reinforce economic advantage and spatial inequality over time.