Spatial proximity is a driver of productive collaboration on new ideas. The formula has been used successfully many times by Bell Labs, Research Triangle Park, and Xerox PARC. A recent study of MIT professors quantified the impact showing that as physical distance on campus between two faculty members increases, the likelihood of productive collaboration (papers, patents) decreases according to a negative exponential function (Figure 1, https://tinyurl.com/MITcitation).
Closer to home, Boston Consulting Group highlighted the disparate, decentralized startup resource ecosystem in Atlanta as a potential reason why the throughput of startups falls short of competitors like Austin and Chicago.
Figure 1: The relative frequency of collaborations (on patents) between MIT faculty, plotted against their spatial distance (meters) on campus.
Spatial proximity is necessary, but it is not a sufficient component for creating a high powered innovation ecosystem. A culture that permeates the ecosystem and encourages experimentation, creative problem-solving and risk-taking is also required. Culture, especially at an ecosystem level, is difficult to measure, but its impact is significant. An innovation culture increases the odds that chance interactions between innovators spur a new idea or solve a problem. While it is difficult to measure an ecosystem’s culture, strong innovation cultures celebrate success, reframe failure as learning, have very low barriers to information sharing, remove bureaucracy and encourage cross discipline/sector collaboration.
The spaces and places encourage innovators to gather in high concentration and the ecosystem’s culture catalyzes the productive work.
What Does Good Look Like?
The Los Angeles’ aerospace innovation ecosystem has leveraged places and culture to drive innovation across an expansive region. Today, LA boasts over 90 aerospace related startups clustered in niches with established industry players, universities and government labs throughout the region (Figure 2). El Segundo, a hotbed for LA’s hard tech scene, alone has 13 aerospace startups in a mere five and a half square mile city limits. SpaceX (Hawthorne, CA), founded in 2002, in part seeded the growth of aerospace startups (at least 18) throughout southern California, bringing an entrepreneurial edge to LA’s well-developed aerospace industry cluster. The region also supports two unique industry-specific startup accelerators, the Techstars Space Accelerator and the SCALE Aerospace Accelerator, multiple university programs, and its . The region’s success has been its ability to keep its talent local, to fuse new and established innovation cultures, and to build clusters of expertise.
Figure 2: Maps of Los Angeles’ Aerospace Innovation Ecosystem and Startups
Where is Georgia Today (Fall 2024)?
The epicenter of Georgia’s cleantech innovation ecosystem is clearly the city of Atlanta today, however, there are spaces and places outside of the city with the capability to nucleate cleantech startup communities. In Atlanta, ATDC‘s sustainability program has 21 startups, most in pre-seed and seed stage, working out of its Midtown Atlanta location. Georgia Tech and Georgia State have a number of vibrant spaces in the city for prototyping, demonstration, and manufacturing, including but not limited to EXLAB, the Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions Lab, and the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility. A number of more advanced startups, many of which are hard tech companies, have set up their headquarters on the city’s south and west sides. Outside the city, spaces at Curiosity Labs (Peachtree Corners), The Water Tower (Buford), and the Cleantech Campus at Seapoint combine startup incubation space with specialized testing and demonstration capabilities. In the future, the Rowen innovation district, located approximately halfway between Atlanta and Athens, will be a dynamic environment for startup and corporate R&D across multiple sectors, including cleantech. However, what Georgia lacks is the dedicated home base for its cleantech innovation ecosystem, which is one common element of each major cleantech innovation ecosystem in the US (i.e. Greentown Labs in Boston and Houston, Global Energy Park in Denver, LACI in Los Angeles, NewLab in New York and mHub in Chicago).
It is perhaps too early for Georgia’s cleantech innovation ecosystem to have a well defined and pervasive culture. By comparison, Los Angeles’ aerospace ecosystem required the hard-charging startup culture of SpaceX to reinvigorate the forward-thinking culture and risk-taking attitude that established LA as an aerospace hub after World War II. While cleantech in Georgia doesn’t have the 60+ year history that aerospace had in LA, the state does currently have a strong cohort of successful cleantech entrepreneurs that have bucked conventional wisdom and grown companies in the region even though it may have been easier to do in Boston, San Francisco or New York. Their struggles and successes will in large part define our ecosystem’s culture, and it is the task of our storytellers to spread those stories widely.
What is Next?
Place, space and culture building take time, planning and immense collaboration. There are a few things that can get started immediately to support this step.
First, a plan needs to be developed to create the cleantech innovation community’s dedicated home base. The plan needs to identify how the facility will be additive, how it will attract and engage the community, and how it will evolve as the ecosystem grows. There are plenty of co-working facilities in the area, that model will not be sufficient for this facility. It will need to provide innovators with a competitive advantage and be coordinated with the broader ecosystem strategy.
Second, the ecosystem’s storytellers should put focus into telling stories of its successful entrepreneurs and companies. The goal is not to create a hero culture, but to highlight the lessons learned, instill a “this can happen here” belief, and begin lowering the barrier to knowledge transfer.
Third, to take advantage of the wealth of assets for cleantech companies that exist outside of today’s epicenter in Atlanta, a clustering strategy needs to be built into the overarching strategy. LA’s aerospace ecosystem stretches from Santa Barbara to Irvine which is roughly equivalent to the distance between Atlanta and Augusta. The ability to develop cleantech innovation “niches” nearby Georgia’s differentiable assets (see our 3rd post for more) like ports, labs, manufacturing sites will be critical.
How Do We Know When We Get There?
Landing a dedicated space is a major step and sign of progress for any innovation ecosystem. It signals to the local community a willingness to invest in its innovators and to those outside Georgia that there is reason to take note of the activity in this ecosystem. Beyond signaling, having a dedicated location reduces the barrier to participation in the ecosystem for the entire community. Finding meetups, events, networking opportunities and new programs all become easier when there is a de facto hub of innovation activity. While creation of a physical center of gravity is not the end point, it is certainly a meaningful milestone that propels an innovation ecosystem toward world class status.
Stay tuned for the final installment of this series around empowering the talent and workforce that animates the innovation ecosystem. If you like this please consider following us on LinkedIn, subscribing to our newsletter, or making a donation.