Here are the Top Innovation Hubs
A report by JLL points to eight groups of cities across varying innovation and talent concentrations.
Innovation is good for commercial real estate. In this case, not innovation within the industry itself — a good idea on its own — but because when it happens in other industries, companies form and grow and all need space.
Existing centers like San Francisco remain important, given established companies, spin-offs, university resources, pools of talent, and investment capital. New York, Boston, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, and Paris have also been important.
But it’s expensive to live and operate in many of those places, so JLL points to other cities that are becoming homes to innovation. Big in the U.S. is Austin, Texas and Raleigh, North Carolina. Though, frankly, they’ve been important innovation centers for years.
JLL says that alternative tech investment has grown by 231% over the past five years.
“In other cases, such as Adelaide, Leeds, Rotterdam and Stuttgart, growth has disproportionately come from individuals moving for quality-of-life reasons and pushing up talent concentration scores,” they wrote. “Simultaneously, destinations for investment capital and business including Dublin, Frankfurt, Las Vegas, Melbourne and Warsaw are at the top of the board for gains in innovation output, particularly patents and venture capital deployment.”
Internationally, the list has come to include Brisbane, Australia; Lisbon, Portugal; Manchester, England; and Hangzhou, China. Semiconductor manufacturing, once (and still) heavily centered in Taiwan and extending out to Phoenix, Arizona; Columbus, Ohio; Berlin, Germany; and Fukuoka, Japan.