How Tulsa pushed back against the Silicon Valley myth and found its own tech niche

For the better part of the last half-century, the world has traveled to California to experience Silicon Valley. They’ve heard from Stanford dropouts-turned-unicorn founders, toured dazzling tech campuses, spoken with shrewd venture capitalists, and discussed, ad nauseum, the region’s core DNA. They’ve come to scoop up the secret fertilizer, take it back home, and sprinkle it onto the local soil in the hopes of magically growing “Silicon Prairie,” or “Silicon Heartland,” or Silicon Fill-in-the-Blank.

In reality, few places in the United States—almost none outside a handful of big coastal cities—have succeeded. Eventually, hopeful communities have abandoned their “innovation hubs” after disappointing results. But not all of them. Among the rare successes of a burgeoning tech hub, Tulsa stands out. I know because I helped lead the city’s reinvention. So, in understanding how northeast Oklahoma managed to establish a growing innovation economy, other places may finally be able to carve out a sustainable path in tech.

The task isn’t simple—there are no shortcuts. But that’s because, in the end, there’s no secret ingredient. It simply comes down to whether cities can find the niche that corresponds with their strength and exploit it. No place will be able to compete with Silicon Valley’s money—but great gobs of capital sit in various locales, and yet few have become tech hubs. No place can replicate the Valley’s concentration of talent—but for all the celebrated universities, few have spawned notable clusters of innovation. That’s not what’s really important.

Here’s what istruly important: Having a community think carefully about what their value add can be to the greater world of tech, and how they can lean into that specific attribute. Innovation economies grow from the bottom-up, not the top-down, and they can be tailored to fit your city. Thisis what Tulsa is doing so successfully—and it’s the reason that I’m convinced other cities can do the same.

When I was recruited to Tulsa in 2019, the economy’s two pillars—oil and gas—were both on the ropes. Like many other midsized cities, there was rising alarm that Oklahomans were poised to be left behind by AI, the state’s manufacturing and service jobs gutted by automation.

So, the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation asked me to lead an effort less to make the region a mini-Silicon Valley, and more to help Tulsa find what I call its “tech niche”—its own special place in the 21st century economy. As one cowboy hat-wearing entrepreneur told me, “We don’t want to be San Francisco. We want to be the best version of ourself.”

But that just raised a series of questions that most cities struggle to answer: What should the community’s tech identity be? How could we create durable jobs? Where should we deploy scarce capital? The economic development organization I founded, Tulsa Innovation Labs, led a community-wide effort to answer those questions.

We looked initially at education technology and discarded it as a focus—Tulsa simply didn’t have a competitive advantage in that realm. We then looked at agriculture technology and set that aside too—the potential impact of investing in that cluster wasn’t sufficient to building a resilient tech economy.

Instead, we zeroed in on four areas where we believed we could create the critical mass of activity necessary to reinvent Tulsa’s economy: virtual health, energy tech, advanced air mobility, and cyber. Having narrowed the field, we raised over $200 million in four years to invest in those clusters and put ourselves on track to create 20,000 jobs.

The question today is what other older industrial economies such as St. Louis, Buffalo, and Cincinnati can learn from Tulsa’s experience. And the lesson is surprisingly simple: Rather than try to emulate Silicon Valley, they should find their own tech niche and then invest in infrastructure that fuels growth in those clusters. To do that, they need to follow four principles.

First, cities should build on existing industries

Every city has longstanding employers with expertise that can be transitioned to tech. Tulsa’s energy companies were facing intense disruption thanks to climate change. And although Oklahoma’s aerospace industry is largely in maintenance, repair, and overhaul—not tech—the industry’s regional facilities offered existing infrastructure and talent with valuable skills that can translate. Tulsa’s challenge was to build on top of those important assets to spark growth in emerging technologies.

Second, cities need to identify their strongest opportunities in tech

Cities should pick a few tech clusters that are adjacent to existing industries and show long-term growth trends, thereby building a bridge to a more vibrant economy.

Given its legacy as the oil capital of the world, Tulsa’s prime opportunity was energy tech. As was advanced air mobility given the region’s strong history in aerospace and the energy industry’s use of drones to monitor pipelines. While it’s understandable that many startups want to be in Silicon Valley, others are realizing it’s wiser to build near established industries with the ready-made partners they provide and the dynamic ecosystems they can offer.

Third, those searching for a niche should ensure it promises a range of jobs

San Francisco is a cautionary tale because the explosion almost exclusively of high-paying positions for the most educated has increased housing prices and widened inequality. Choosing clusters that offer jobs demanding a variety of skills and education levels—jobs open to those without bachelor’s degrees—can drive inclusion. In Tulsa, we selected cyber in part because workers with skills-based credentials are essential to the industry. About a third of the 20,000 jobs Tulsa is on track to create are accessible without a bachelor’s degree.

Finally, cities should select a niche that allows them to lead

Midsized cities need not compete with major tech hubs. Instead, they should search for specific clusters, sub-clusters, or parts of an industry’s value chain in which they can lead. For virtual health, Tulsa’s opportunity was in remote care solutions—technologies that, for example, enable remote glucose monitoring. Virtual health also has nice synergies with cybersecurity, which keeps those remote systems safe, as well as advanced air mobility in which drones could deliver pharmaceuticals to rural parts of the region. The specific clusters that comprise your tech niche should reinforce each other.

Silicon Valley is a unicorn, and for too long, it has been viewed as the model for places that can’t possibly recreate it. This myth has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with a national innovation economy that leaves out most Americans and dismisses the Heartland as “flyover country.” Places like Tulsa can thrive in the decades to come if they find the right niche. Pulling off an economic renaissance isn’t easy to do, but it’s entirely realistic. For anyone living in a place that’s being left behind by tech, know that you can write your own future if you and your neighbors work together and grow from the inside out.

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