5 Steps to Make Chicago the Next Great Innovation Hub

Chicago. For people who love it, there's no place like it in the world. For people who've just visited...well, they've still usually had at least one encounter with a great slice of deep dish. Chicago is unquestionably the Midwest's great city. Yet, for all the devotion Chicago commands, its technology and startup scene are less developed than would seem to befit a city of its stature.

All that may be changing, however. This year, the city got its own TechStars/Y Combinator-style incubator in Excelerate, which was started by the founders of sites like OKCupid.com. In about a week, Chicago will also play host to a major conference for startups and investors in the Midwest called midVentures Launch.

To build excitement and knowledge around the conference, midVentures is also hosting a blog discussion about what it would take for Chicago to become a technology hub. As someone who spent 7 years there going to school and building social enterprises, only to leave to come to San Francisco to start my web business, this is something I've thought about:

1. Sell Aspiration: While Chicago may not be Silicon Valley just yet, it's recent crop of startups have some pretty big names. Groupon, which is arguably the hottest startup in the world, is based an Chicago and was started by a Northwestern alum. 37Signals are undisputed thought leaders in the modern startup era. Every high school and college student in Chicagoland should know them.

2. Internship Programs for Local University CS kids: One of the biggest deficits in the Chicago startup scene is just a lack of knowledge about what the field actually looks like. There are lots of promising computer science folks at universities like Northwestern and UChicago, but the internships they get in the summers between classes are rarely with local startup companies. This is a missed learning opportunity.

3. Aggressive career recruiting for those same students when they graduate: Perhaps even more important than the above, the biggest loss for the Chicago startup scene is the braindrain that happens every time a class of CS majors graduates and gets safe jobs as analysts and programmers at Wells Fargo. In my opinion, the best thing that anyone who cares about the Chicago scene could do would be to fundamentally disrupt this talent syphon and show students a different path.

4. Solving different problems than the Valley: Chicago startups are potentially better positioned to address certain types of problems than are startups in Silicon Valley. Whereas, in the Valley, technology and innovation are the real world, in Chicago, the local reality is much more driven by the cares and concerns of average people. There is a big opportunity to learn from customers who better match the profile of most of the world. Chicago also has a unique history when it comes to addressing issues of civic participation, education, health, poverty, urban violence, and more. I wouldn't be surprised to see tech startups that attack some of these types of problems.

5. Increasing the two-way flow with the Valley: Ultimately, the reason to build innovation hubs outside Silicon Valley is not to portent it's decline, but to help others rise. The trajectory is more startups from more places needing less capital. In my mind, that means the potential for more job creation, more startups focused on problems that really matter to people. But new hubs benefit from the accumulated wisdom (not to mention capital) of places that have been doing startups for longer, and creating a pathway that can send Chicago talent to the Valley and then bring it home would be invaluable.

Will Chicago become an innovation hub over night? Of course not. But then again, with things moving as fast as they are, it might not take too long.

Photo credit: terren in Virginia