The US National Science Foundation unveiled a new programme in early May aimed at expanding the nation’s innovation ecosystem beyond the large, successful clusters in Boston and the West Coast to secondary cities with undeveloped tech potential.
In doing so, the famed US science funder is trying a new approach to a problem faced by most developed countries: How to spread the tech wealth more broadly? How this American programme fares will no doubt be tracked by research policy-makers world-wide.
Image: The map of US innovation clusters in 2015 - dark blue for innovation leaders, light blue for laggards (grey for missing data.) Source: US Cluster Mapping Project, Harvard Business School.
