While we are seeing more attention to addressing the paucity of useful national entrepreneurship data globally, efforts to develop comparable city-level information have been less of a focus with only a handful of global city rankings. How are city leaders now moving beyond dated “cluster and technology park” thinking to appeal to entrepreneurs and investors?
As I reported often in 2013, entrepreneurship policy is getting much more attention on the national policymaking agendas of governments around the world. Nations have started to compete in a race to build healthy entrepreneurship ecosystems, demanding better data – such as the World Bank Doing Business Indicators, OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators and more – to fuel and measure their efforts. In contrast, comparable city-level data is even more scarce and global city rankings are few. Nonetheless, city leaders are seeking to have entrepreneurs and investors pin their cities on their map and they are doing so with efforts that make clusters and technology parks look more like obsolete civil engineering projects as opposed to efficient local entrepreneurship policy.
Image: http://entrepreneurship.org
