Silicon Valley Innovation: Geography Is Destiny, Says Study

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

When it comes to turning good ideas into great businesses, there's no place like home.

Researchers have built a new map of entrepreneurial "hotspots" in California and pinpoint the San Francisco Bay Area -- Silicon Valley, in particular -- as birthing more successful startups than anywhere else in the state.

Startups in Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale have 20 times the average quality of the median and 90 times that of the lowest-ranked cities in California, according to the analysis, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"The entire ecosystem is nurturing and helping companies within Silicon Valley realize their promise on a more guaranteed basis than anywhere else in the state," said co-author Steve Stern of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Ma.

Previous attempts to identify promising geographies have focused on the quantity, not quality, of startups per capita -- -- a metric that results in high scores for low-population places with lots of pizza parlors, dry cleaners and coffee shops.

The Boston team's statistical study of entrepreneurial economies -- the first of its type -- takes a different approach.

An article well worth your time.