Every Great Journey Begins With A Map

By Eric Eide

While Silicon Beach is home to nearly 600 startups, which include high profile unicorns such as Bird and Snap, it is but one concentrated tech hub within SoCal (Santa Barbara to San Diego) that contains an additional 3,000 innovative startups. The diversity of ideas and people working within a wide range of increasingly converging industries such as agriculture, biotech, entertainment, and information technology, are assets that fuel innovation in our region. Nonetheless, the region’s sheer size with over 24 million people stretching across 50,000 square miles can make it difficult for residents and outsiders alike to navigate. In order to unlock the region’s innovation potential and boost desirable employment opportunities, we need to first make the region’s innovation landscape understandable and accessible.

The Alliance for Southern California Innovation (Alliance) and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) undertook the effort to help fix this regional “usability” issue. Through an extensive strategic consulting project, we collaborated to quantify and characterize the Southern California innovation landscape with the goal of better understanding the region’s strengths and opportunities. Our hope is that a more transparent accounting of innovative efforts, which lays out what is happening and where it is happening, will clarify the landscape and thus drive engagement from key stakeholders such as entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners, universities, local governments, and communities.

Continue reading on the Alliance website.

Eric Eide is Director of Ecosystem Development at the Alliance for SoCal Innovation. You can also find him on LinkedIn and the Alliance website.