The underlying drive for the Global Startup Ecosystem Report is to answer three key questions founders, investors, and policymakers have been asking all over the globe:

1. Where are the top performing ecosystems in the world? Said in a different way, where do early-stage startups have the best shot at building global success?

2. Why are some places on the rise while others are falling behind?

3. How should ecosystems increase their chances of winning in the global startup revolution?

Since 2011 we have been on a mission to codify and understand the Success Factors of startup ecosystems so more places have a chance of creating and capturing their fair share of value created by the global startup revolution. 

We have made tremendous progress since then and continue do so. The 2019 Global Startup Ecosystem Report is by far the largest, most comprehensive startup ecosystem research ever done — by Startup Genome and our field in general. Among other things, this year our research has:

• More than doubled the number of ecosystems studied since our last published rankings — assessing over 130 ecosystems to rank the top 30 globally.

• Expanded our research and overall rankings to include Deep Tech startups, partnering with Paris-based Hello Tomorrow to do so. Specifically, we are going deep in Life Sciences, publishing a top 20 ranking including all-new Life Sciences ecosystem Success Factors, which will quantify innovation in policy and knowledge creation and diffusion.

• Studied more than 1 million patents, in partnership with Prof. David Rigby at UCLA, tying them to specific startup sub-sectors and ecosystems, calculating the potential of each technology class, and measuring the knowledge space of each of our studied ecosystems.

• Incorporated several real-time data sources to our broader model, from Google Trends to track public discourse on startups, to Github to identify active programmers, to Meetup data for measuring local tech events.

• Collected information on public policy actions taken by governments to support startup ecosystems. Our initial “audit” of public policy will serve as the basis for subsequent analysis tying specific policy actions to ecosystem performance.

• Startup Genome’s broader Ecosystem Assessment Framework includes over 200 metrics, which will better capture the ecosystem factors that drive startup performance.