What a new innovation index tells us about Baltimore

Baltimore is the biggest economy in one of the country’s best educated states. 

Almost a quarter of Marylanders have an advanced degree, the third highest total in the United States. Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University managed $3.4 billion in research & development in 2022, according to the National Science Foundation, the most of any academic institution. 

Made rich by cybersecurity demands, the Baltimore region has an experienced technical workforce, outpacing the national average in the number of software developers. It’s cheaper too: per Nerdwallet, almost a third less expensive than nearby Washington DC. 

Yet Baltimore doesn’t top many lists of major tech and startup hubs, which we’ll pick up below. 

These themes appear in Technical.ly’s second annual State of the Baltimore Tech Economy report, which was released today. It’s part of our deeper dive into the communities we follow closest.

Given all the positives, why is Baltimore not a top-tier tech hub — even if its status as a tech hub has been given federal blessing? 

In a word: diffusion. Innovation works best in density — where invention and commercialization can walk to get a coffee. Plenty of Baltimore leaders get this: look at University of Maryland Biopark’s chief Jane Shaab, UpSurge executive director and obsessive organizer Kory Bailey and the well-regarded Impact Hub Baltimore, all tireless connectors. 

UpSurge teamed up with homegrown startup EcoMap to launch their Baltimore.Tech resource directory to help more find the tools to grow companies here.

But theirs is a lonely crusade weighed down by longstanding trends. Whereas Maryland posts steady-enough population growth for a slow-growth part of our country, Baltimore City has been shrinking since the 1950s. Back in the mid-1990s, Baltimore County first surpassed in population the city it surrounds, but does not include. The result is that Baltimore’s tech economy, including its researchers, entrepreneurs and tech workers, is moving farther apart. Before the pandemic, the average Baltimore commute was longer than other mid-sized cities, per the Census Bureau, and today tech meetup culture isn’t overcoming the weight of this spread.

Among big regions, Baltimore has had one of the worst declines in economic mobility for poor residents over the last decade, according to fresh research from the Opportunity Insights team at Harvard Business School. A key to boosting economic mobility is income integration, encouraging network building between poorer and weather communities. Population loss and dispersal won’t help.

Inside our State of the Baltimore Tech Economy report, we look at Technical.ly’s brand-new Map of Innovation Ecosystems, which we released Monday.

The map is designed to help get started in any of the country’s most vibrant tech and startup hubs. It also includes the first go of our Innovation Index, which measures the regions we track on six indicators that are informed by the Ecosystem Stack we developed from our reporting.

All those strengths, and challenges, for Baltimore are on display. It has top-tier research and development and is among cheapest places to live of the 24 regions we indexed. 

But the city has a rotten rating for business ease and economic mobility for poor residents is among the country’s worst. Too many Baltimore residents never get a shot to discover what they can offer Maryland’s tech economy. Its startup ecosystem value, as measured by our friends at the Startup Genome Project as the total of exits and valuations in the frothy 2021-2023 period, is respectably sized, especially when indexed by population size. 

Put in per capita terms, Baltimore’s startup economy was bigger than Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami.

Where to go from here? As Technical.ly argued in last year’s inaugural SOTE report, Baltimore needs Maryland, and so attention from Gov. Wes Moore is a welcome signal. Improve most on where Baltimore performed worst on our index: City government has had a rotten reputation going back decades, including encouraging entrepreneurship, and there are too few concerted efforts to mix incomes. Fewer and fewer places, and efforts, change that. More than most places, this city needs narrative change — stories of successes so that others will follow. Too few make investments in sharing that story.