Inc. Magazine named Minneapolis as one of the best cities for starting a business in 2020.
Minnesota's largest startup city came in at No. 40 on the list of 50 U.S. cities, one spot behind Oklahoma City and one ahead of Oxnard, Calif.
Inc. credited some of the Twin Cities Fortune 500 companies, such as Target and Land O' Lakes, as driving forces in the startup scene. In 2017, Land O' Lakes launched its own dairy industry accelerator and Target has run several programs since at least 2016. Other local accelerators with big backers include the Techstars Farm to Fork program (supported by Ecolab and Cargill) and the Techstars UnitedHealthcare accelerator.
And even as the city's population growth has stagnated, Inc. says, the five-year business survival rate in Minneapolis is 54.4% – the third highest in the nation.
Overall, Minneapolis ranked No. 15 for net business creation; No. 24 for early-stage funding deals and No. 27 for high-growth company density.
A separate report published earlier this week by the Brookings Institution said that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro had the potential to become one of America's next major tech hubs.
Brookings analyzed 35 U.S. Cities that could potentially provide a strong alternative to places like San Francisco, Boston and New York City. The Twin Cities came in at No. 2 after Madison, Wisc. The region was recognized for its high number of college graduates and filed patents.
"We continue to believe there's a strong set of up-and-coming, often heartland places that have a lot to offer," Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and one of the authors of the report, told the Biz Journal. "There's no reason Minneapolis/St. Paul can't emerge as a true global tech center."
