By Richard Florida
CityLab
Mayors, economic developers, and business leaders alike all say they want one thing: more entrepreneurship. Across the country and the world, there’s been no shortage of efforts to clone the “next Silicon Valley.”
In their attempts to do just that, city leaders fixate on two things that they believe are necessary to the entrepreneurial potential of a particular place: copious amounts of venture capital, and research universities that transfer skills and technology as they spawn new companies. I see this argument time and again, and each time I’m reminded of an old insider’s joke: If you want to create another Silicon Valley, ”take one great research university. Add venture capital. Shake vigorously.”
But as Silicon Valley’s own Paul Graham has pointed out, the actual formula is far more complicated. Truly entrepreneurial places like Silicon Valley have a distinct personality—Graham likes to refer to it as “a place that tolerates oddness”—that is central to their economic success.
A new study by the personality psychologists Sam Gosling and Jason Rentfrow (with whom I have collaborated before), the economist David Audretsch, and others seeks to understand how this notion of an entrepreneurial personality affects a city’s ability to innovate and create new companies.
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