Full Citation
Title: THE CASE for GROWTH CENTERS: How to spread tech innovation across America
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2019
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: It has become clear that while the future of America’s economy lies in its high-tech innovation sector, that same sector has widened the nation’s regional divides—a fact that became starkly apparent with the 2016 presidential election. Dependent on intense agglomerations of highly skilled workers and based on winner-take-most network economies, the innovation sector has generated significant technology gains and wealth but has also helped spawn a growing gap between the nation’s dynamic “superstar” metropolitan areas and most everywhere else. Neither market forces nor bottom-up economic development efforts have closed this gap, nor are they likely to. Instead, these deeply seated dynamics appear ready to exacerbate the current divides. This is why the nation needs a major push to counter these dynamics. Specifically, the nation needs—as one initiative among others—a massive federal effort to transform a short list of “heartland” metro areas with compelling strengths into self-sustaining “growth centers” that will benefit entire regions. The present paper, therefore, proposes that Congress assemble and award to a select set of metropolitan areas a major package of federal innovation inputs and supports that would help those areas accelerate transformative innovation sector scale-up. Along these lines, we envision Congress establishing a rigorous competitive process by which the most promising eight to 10 potential growth centers (all not geographically located near existing successful tech hubs) would receive substantial financial and regulatory support for 10 years to get “over the hump” and become self-sustaining new innovation centers. Such an initiative would not only bring significant economic opportunity to more parts of the nation, but also significantly boost U.S. and innovation-based competitiveness, including in the competition with China....
Url: http://www2.itif.org/2019-growth-centers.pdf
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Atkinson, Robert D.; Muro, Mark; Whiton, Jacob
Publisher: Brookings Institute
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
Countries: