What a new innovation index tells us about the DMV region

The distance between Washington DC and Baltimore (40 miles) is less than the distance between San Francisco and San Jose (50 miles). The train trip between the former is faster too.

Yet the second pair outlines Silicon Valley, one of the most durably inventive regions in the world. The first two are neighbors at best — I think the DMV is an effective brand, and we at Technical.ly use it heavily, but the M and V don’t all agree, and Baltimore wants to go its own way. No doubt rivalries exist within Silicon Valley but it’s all within a single state, unlike Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, where jurisdictions compete at the neighborhood, city, county, regional and state levels. 

Even still, the region is a top-tier innovation economy, one in which Techncial.ly will have reported for a decade come 2025. DC’s culture and power, Maryland’s cybersecurity pros and PhDs, Northern Virginia’s data centers and software developers: No doubt this region is one of the most important tech clusters on Earth. 

All these themes appear in Technical.ly’s second annual State of the DC Tech Economy report, which was released today. It’s part of our deeper dive into the communities we follow closest: Find them all here.

Inside our State of the DC 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 the DC region are on display.

This startup ecosystem is similarly sized to Austin and Chicago, and the region is rich with technical talent. But among the 24 regions we have indexed so far, DC remains expensive and most of its research is within the federal government, without a truly elite research university. Worse still, per new research from Opportunity Insights at Harvard Business School, the DC region has had one of the worst declines in economic mobility of the regions we indexed — a strong signal of dynamism. 

All that leaves the DC region in the middle-pack of the regions we indexed — sandwiched between poorer Philadelphia and Detroit, though both have underrecognized startup ecosystems of their own. 

Where to go from here? One of the most important challenges to address for the DMV is regionalism, which helpfully several organizations are. This region is big enough that several hubs are possible — Silicon Valley certainly has many — but it helps when they identify as the same team. DC against the world? Identity comes with narrative change, so we at Technical.ly hope to contribute.