Working with the Center for American Entrepreneurship in Miami
We partnered with the Center for American Entrepreneurship to conduct analyses evaluating the development of technology entrepreneurship in Greater Miami on behalf of the Knight Foundation.
The final report on this research was co-authored by our partner Rhett Morris and Ian Hathaway, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It was published by the Knight Foundation in June of 2022.
What did we learn?
Our research for the Center for American Entrepreneurship highlighted a number of new findings. For example, we demonstrated that Greater Miami has experienced rapid employment growth among software workers since 2013 when Knight and other partners began working to support local technology entrepreneurship.
From 2013 to 2020, the number of software jobs in Greater Miami increased faster than in any of the other largest metropolitan areas.
Additional key findings from the final report were as follows.
Over the past decade, the technology sector in Greater Miami has grown significantly. The region is now a major destination for entrepreneurs who want to build tech companies — especially among immigrants to the United States.
The Miami metro region has seen consistent growth in the amount of capital invested in local tech companies. The number of exits valued at over $100 million has also increased in recent years along with the number of privately held “unicorns.”
There are clear links between the work of the Knight Foundation and its grantees and the local tech sector’s growth. Interviews and analyses suggest that the greatest impact likely came from four areas: changing the narrative, increasing access to capital, funding effective entrepreneurship support organizations, and improving local quality of life.
Foundation and civic leaders in other cities who wish to support local tech entrepreneurship can learn several lessons from the Knight Foundation and its grantees. Leaders should recognize that supporting local technology entrepreneurship takes a significant amount of time. Miami’s experience also suggests that just a few entrepreneur support organizations can have an outsized impact in terms of job creation and the amount of capital raised.