When in 2012 Alessandro and I wrote “Tech and the City”, startups were not popular yet in New York. We were surprised that on the Made in NY Digital Map website there was the news that 1,040 technological companies were hiring. Today NYC is home to over 7,000 Startups, and the tech ecosystem is worth $71 billion with more than 326,000 jobs, according to the last Global Startup Ecosystems Report (GSER), just published. This report is an analysis of over 60 startup ecosystems in 24 countries produced by Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN): it concludes that New York City is the world’s second highest performing ecosystem.
Another finding of the report is that some of the new strengths of the NYC tech ecosystem are in advanced manufacturing and robotics, cybersecurity, and health and life sciences subsectors.
Life sciences will be the focus of the European Tech Night on April 26 at the Italian Consulate . The NYC ecosystem is supported by major local assets: nine academic medical centers, $1.6 billion in National Institutes of Health funding research in 2016, and 450,000 local jobs. The sub-sector is also being accelerated by the City’s 10-year, $500 million LifeSci NYC initiative.
It’s nice to see that one of the new trends that “Tech and the City” had identified as important for the future of New York is getting real. In the chapter “Beyond Consumer Web: What’s Next?” we wrote:
Beyond enterprise software and database systems, the technology sector in New York can also develop in other directions. That’s what Micah Kotch hopes: “I would like to see the city embrace things such as health care IT or energy IT, what we call ‘clean web’, and really expand and look to get smart people working on problems that really need to be solved. New York City should not try to replicate Silicon Valley. We’re not Silicon Valley, and we’ll never be like Silicon Valley. But if you look at California’s track record for deal flow and volume, they have really a sophisticated network in health care and life sciences, and that kind of sector diversity is something that New York really needs to encourage.”
Already in 2012 the Partnership for New York City Fund with the support of the Department of health of New York State launched the New York Digital Health Accelerator, which now is called New York Digital Health Innovation Lab: an annual program for growth-stage companies that have developed cutting-edge technology products for health care organizations. Now there are many more spaces for Health and Life sciences startups – such as Alexandria Center for Life Sciences, Biobat, Biolabs, IDA, Harlem biospace, SUNY Downstate medical center biotechnology incubator, and Johnson&Johnson Innovation Labs – and programs such as ELabNYC and New York Bioforce. More info here: LifeSci NYC.
