What Montgomery can learn from Chattanooga's startup success

Post-industrial cities can re-platform their economies by fostering institutions that drive innovation and attract both financial and human capital. By promoting long-term collaboration between universities, cultural institutions, and entrepreneurs, Pittsburgh has undergone a three-decade-long urban reinvention. With Carnegie Mellon University as an anchor, the city’s robotics research sector has attracted investment from government projects and venture capital, creating a ripple effect of growth and urban development.

Access to the internet is an important tool to addressing inequity at the scale of the community and the individual. Detriot’s Equitable Internet Initiative is a coalition of media, tech, and community-based organizations working to bridge the digital divide in underserved neighborhoods.

As major manufacturers keep "pulling the rug" from under urban areas, low skilled job loss increases. Nevertheless, small-scale businesses have instrumental in their ability to counteract job loss in improvised urban areas. Small businesses are using tactics such as creative tax cut regulation to cut corners to pay livable wages to low-income workers.

Turin used to be a bustling hub for the automobile industry but since then it has been left as a dead industrial area. The Ex-incet development aims to change this by using an old company's headquarters to be the site where innovation and creativity can be brought together as people from different sectors work under the same roof.

Public-private collaborations can promote entrepreneurship and foster economic revitalization. In the Franklinton neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, partnerships between the city of Columbus, the Franklinton Development Association (FDA), and local businesses have led to a flourishing of artist studios, maker spaces, and other community attractions. The initiatives were funded in part by grants from ArtPlace America as well as the city of Columbus.

The residents of Etteln, Germany responded to rural decline and digital exclusion by organizing grassroots collective action—including volunteer-led fiber-optic installation and community-driven digital innovations—which reversed population loss, doubled school enrollment, earned global recognition as the world's smartest city, and created a replicable model now used by 500+ cities worldwide.

Companies like Gaggle are typically used by school districts to track student online behavior, but now they are tracking something else—self-harm. Machine learning flags words that might indicate a student is thinking of hurting themselves. “It gives us insight into what the student's thinking.” Gaggle identified 64,000 student references to suicide and self-harm. The company claims to have saved 927 student lives. In Mason City, districts receive alerts when a student’s search is flagged. “Nicole Pfirman says there have been a few times where she believes an alert saved a kid's life.”

The city of Detroit is offering business services to entrepreneurs who want to bring their business online in the aftermath of the pandemic. Digital Detroit is the name of the program offering content creation and website development completely free of charge for a variety of businesses. Over 100 businesses were selected for the five-week program, helping the entrepreneurs to move their services online, creating, and launching websites as well as establishing social media presence, all of which has gone a long way in increasing sales and profits.

To expand wifi access during the coronavirus pandemic for those who work in the agricultural community and in migrant farmworker camps, the City of The Dalles partnered and collaborated with Google and other community businesses to purchase hot spots and Chromebooks for farmworkers to use. The hot spots don't work in all areas of the county, but in the orchards with cell service where they have been installed, they have been helping to provide access to telemedicine and educational services.

After learning that the U.S. would likely face a shortage of ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic, a group of "scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, physicians and regulatory experts" collaborated to design an automatic resuscitator that can be used to help "less critically ill patients." The streamlined creation comes with an affordable price tag, making it more scalable for use in rural areas or less developed regions, and has also been approved by the F.D.A. for use in hospitals.