Over at the New Republic, Mark Muro and Jonothan Rothwell have published two posts on the intense geographic clustering of the 100 companies likely to make the greatest impact on the cleantech market in the next decade, a list developed by the Cleantech Group with The Guardian.

The scholars find that the cleantech market's most promising firms are concentrated in four major metropolitan areas: San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and Los Angeles. These areas house two-thirds of the companies on the list.

As Muro and Rothwell write: "It just goes to show the power of place. Innovative firms--in cleantech especially--really do seem to cluster together."

There seem to be several reasons behind this intense concentration. First, clustering benefits entire industries, as it "facilitates matching, sharing, and learning" between similar companies when they decide to locate near each other.

Second, and perhaps less well-known, is that the assets of a specific region, rather than other firms, can cause similar companies to locate in a specific geography. Leading university research creates innovation, and these benefits accrue to an entire industry, rather than a specific firm. Thus, industries and their firms frequently cluster around a common scientific base.

It follows that leading research programs in a relevant field could facilitate the most important commercial breakthroughs for that industry. Such programs would consistently turn out graduate students with cutting-edge skills and knowledge, who could then partner with entrepreneurs to commercialize their ideas or overcome technical obstacles

This directly applies to the clean economy:

So, the question naturally arises, do metros with high-ranking research programs in energy and environmental science also have more cleantech startups?

The answer is yes, as implied by the overlapping city names. There is a very high correlation between the number of top research programs and the number of cleantech start-ups, as the graph below shows. For every top-ranked program there are 1.5 globally recognized cleantech start-ups.

Interestingly,

Only the number of top-ranked research programs is predictive of top start-ups. Apparently, mediocre technical expertise is good enough for successful employment, as implied by federal data on wages and unemployment rates by education attainment, but only the best skills matter in starting cutting-edge cleantech firms that attract the attention of venture capital firms and global industry experts.

The implications of these findings are that regions and their innovation ecosystems matter greatly for the cleantech industry. Secondly, it is cutting-edge expertise that is perhaps most important to regional cleantech advantage.