New research suggests that there's a population tipping point for supporting a booming tech industry
“Become the next Silicon Valley.” So many cities have adopted this goal that it has become a cliché.
Many policymakers want to emulate the economic success of the San Francisco Bay Area by drawing tech workers to their own cities—even if they are relatively small. Yet a new study by Hyejin Youn, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, and her colleagues suggests that modestly sized urban areas can’t just funnel some money into the industry and expect it to thrive.
Growing cities tend to follow a universal pathway, moving from work that relies primarily on manual labor to jobs that rely more heavily on cognitive labor, the researchers report. In a study of U.S. urban areas, the team found that the tipping point tended to occur when the population reached about 1.2 million. Small cities under that threshold may not be able to build a strong tech industry because they don’t have enough people in other industries—from public transit to laundry services—to support software engineers, Youn says.
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]