Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

BOULDER AS A LABORATORY

Boulder is a small city; as of 2012, there are less than 100,000 actual residents with 250,000 people in the extended metro area, which includes the neighboring towns of Superior, Broomfield, Lafayette, Longmont, and Lyons. Boulder is small enough that you can get your mind around the whole place but big enough to be interesting. As a result, I’ve come to think of Boulder as my laboratory for thinking about startup communities.

Boulder is a smart city. The University of Colorado Boulder is located right in the middle of town, and students, faculty, and staff comprise about 30 percent of the population of Boulder. The presence of several national research labs, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) add nicely to the number of PhDs around. Other alternative education centers, such as Naropa, call Boulder their home.

Although I don’t have data to support it, Boulder may have the highest entrepreneurial density in the world. I define entrepreneurial density as follows:

entrepreneurial density = (number of entrepreneurs + number of people working for startups or high growth companies)/adult population.

Boulder’s entrepreneurial density, combined with the geographic concentration of entrepreneurial activity around the Boulder downtown core, makes downtown Boulder a hotbed of startup activity.

In 2011, Colorado ranked ...