An Infographic Power Ranking of California's Start-Up Cities

It seems lately that every place in the United States wants to be home to the next Silicon Valley. But past attempts to rank America's most entrepreneurial regions have focused on the sheer volume of start-ups in a given geography, without giving enough weight to how successful those start-ups have actually been. The result can be lists putting the likes of Mississippi and Alaska ahead of California in the start-up kingdom, and naming Montana the entrepreneurial capital of the country.

With all due respect to Montana, a pair of MIT scientists think they've found a better way. In research set for publication in the journal Science, innovation scholars Jorge Guzman and Scott Stern reveal a new scoring system that focuses on the quality of entrepreneurial activity in a region rather than the mere quantity—backed by some killer maps of start-up supremacy among California cities. The work could help policymakers understand the key factors, geographical and otherwise, that boost start-up success.