San Diego occupies a blessed corner of the United States. With a Mediterranean climate, the city is a tourist destination that drew 32 million visitors in 2012. It hosts the largest naval fleet in the world in its deepwater port, which in turn has attracted major national defense contractors as employers. Bordering on Mexico, San Diego is also the busiest international crossing point in the world and handles the third-highest volume of trade among all US-Mexico land crossings.

This combination has given San Diego an unusually diversified economy, in which defense, tourism, international trade, R&D and manufacturing are the largest sectors. Maintaining its competitive position and quality of life in a fast-changing world, however, is a significant challenge. City government is attacking that challenge on multiple fronts.

Google Fiber

In 2015, San Diego was named a Google Fiber city and began working with Google on a detailed study of regulatory, geographic and other factors that will affect deployment. Google Fiber projects require cities to eliminate permitting and regulatory barriers and to allow Google control over where and when service is deployed.

Career Pathways

While it waits for its fiber future to take shape, the city is focusing on quality of life factors that will shape its potential. California Career Pathways is a collaborative project uniting 14 school districts and 5 community colleges in the region. Funded by a California state grant in 2015, the program covers from kindergarten through community college and develops career pathways into the region’s growth sectors, from advanced manufacturing and clean energy to information and communications technology. It aims to integrate academic and career-based learning and bridge the distance from education to work.

Library Innovation

The San Diego Public Libraries are also investing in a broadband-enabled future that helps drive an innovation economy. The system is engaged in a significant upgrade of online capacity to 100 Mbps at each facility. More importantly, it offers a makerspace, open to the public, providing 3D printers and process tools including vinyl cutters, laser cutters, milling machines and sewing machines. Using this combination of connectivity and hardware, the library has delivered 150 free technology programs to more than 5,000 attendees in the past year, and hosted special events including a Coding Camp, Startup Weekend, Maker Meetups and Robot Days serving hundreds to thousands of citizens.

Challenges to Sustainability

A prolonged drought has brought Californians face-to-face with climate change and the need to manage a more challenging environment. San Diego has responded by making sustainability a social and cultural priority. The city is home to Balboa Park, the largest cultural urban park in the United States and site of the famed San Diego Zoo. A sustainability program launched in 2008 uses the park to conduct sustainability education and engage local arts and cultural organizations in decisions about its future. The city has also achieved US$1.75 million in annual savings and reduced water use by 1.5 million gallons through sustainability investments in the park.

With water becoming more precious by the year, the city embarked on a reuse program called Pure Water San Diego in 2013. City leaders had learned from unsuccessful pilot projects in the past, which were doomed to failure by headlines about “toilet to tap” water. For its new effort, the city developed a comprehensive communications plan and conducted extensive community outreach in person, online and by mail. By the time the Pure Water demonstration project was launched, a poll found that 73% of San Diegans favored water purification to produce a new drinking water supply. A city blessed by circumstance is now finding ways to leverage the skills and passions of its citizens to build an economically and environmentally sustainable future.

Population: 1,356,000

Website: www.sandiego.gov

Smart21 2016

At the end of the last century, Riverside was a bedroom community and university town, agricultural center and warehouse hub in the desert 60 miles from Los Angeles. It also had a large population of poor and poorly educated residents and a signal failure to retain many of the 55,000 graduates leaving its institutions of higher learning.

A High Tech Taskforce

In 2004, the mayor and a community college dean convened a High Tech Taskforce to figure out how to channel some of California's high-tech growth into their community. It became the Riverside Technology CEO Forum, which led a multi-sector effort to change the city's destiny. The city built a fiber network to connect its operations as well as the University Research Park. A free WiFi network now offers up to 1 Mbps service through 1,600 access points, and exploding demand has led multiple commercial carriers to deploy high-speed broadband across the city. Riding the network is an array of award-winning e-government applications, from dynamic traffic management to graffiti tracking and removal.

Riverside has also worked to leverage its universities in multiple ways. College 311, a Web-based hub for educational social and community services, aims to double the number of Riverside youth who complete college. Targeting five knowledge-intensive industries, Riverside and its partners have launched innovation efforts from a highly-acclaimed virtual secondary school to an Innovation Center offering incubation space, business acceleration and interaction with angel and venture investors. These efforts have already attracted 35 high-tech companies and established 20 tech start-ups.

Digital Inclusion

In 2006, Riverside started a digital inclusion program called SmartRiverside, using its free WiFi network, to provide technology training, free computers and software to all of the city's low-income families. Making it happen is Project Bridge, which provides recycled IT equipment to 1,500 new families each year. The equipment is refurbished by reformed gang members, who learn valuable skills; Project Bridge is southern California's largest recycler of e-waste, and the project is funded by eBay sale of excess equipment. From the streets to the research lab, Riverside is ready for the digital age.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Riverside.

Want to know more about Riverside?
Riverside was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum books Brain Gain and Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 306,800

Labor Force: 160,700

Website: www.riversideca.gov

Intelligent Community of the Year 2012

Smart21 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012

Top7 2011 | 2012

America’s first capital, Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth largest city, with an estimated gross metropolitan product of US$490 billion.  Its many universities and colleges make it a top study destination.  It serves as headquarters for five Fortune 1000 companies, and its biggest economic sectors include financial services, healthcare, biotech, IT, transportation, manufacturing and tourism.

But these headline numbers do not tell the full story.  Like other old industrial cities, it suffered decades of decline as automation and globalization eliminated low-skilled employment.  Today, 32% of the population is not in the workforce, the second highest percentage in the US after Detroit.  Half of jobs in Philadelphia require a university degree but only 22% of Philadelphians possess one, and the city’s poverty rate is a high 27%.

When he took office in 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter pledged to double the percentage of young people who attended university. Since then, city government has marshaled local and national resources in an effort to break the cycle of low achievement and economic exclusion.  Among these is enlargement of Pre-K programs to reach three and four-year-old unserved children.  The program is funded by a new tax on sweetened beverages.  Out of a target population of 27,000, the program has delivered higher quality care so far to more than 10,000. 

Expanding Access

Nearly half of Philadelphians lack Internet access at home. Having identified broadband as an essential utility in its master plan, the city assembled a coalition of health, social service and community development organizations called the Freedom Rings Partnership. The group successfully applied for broadband stimulus funding, which has been applied to the development of 77 Keyspot Innovation and Technology Centers (KIT Centers) that offer digital inclusion programs in low-income neighborhoods. Each provides access to technology, digital skills education and training in such essentials as job interviewing and keeping a job. Together, they have served 165,000 participants, with an impact that often reaches far beyond basic digital literacy.

In 2021, Verizon became technology partner to the KIT Centers to keep their tech up to date, and the nonprofit Digital Literacy Alliance funded positions for “digital navigators” to offer one-to-one consulting and training.   

Spurring Business Innovation

An Innovation Consulting program launched by the city offers workshops to government and business organizations and consults with clients to improve their stakeholder communication, business processes, and strategic planning.  More than half of workshop attendees are non-governmental. Since 2015, a city-backed Innovation Fund has invested in 29 projects that improve quality of life and and prepare residents for educational success and engagement in the city's future.  On the quality of life side are Rec Radio, a radio station that informs and entertains the community, and an urban wood design competition, in which local youth organization use salvaged wood from city parks to create furniture prototypes.  Residents gain educational preparation from The Achievers Initiative, which helps individual achieve a high school equivalency credential, and a training kit that teaches best practices for volunteer leaders in overcoming barriers to progress in neighborhoods that have traditionally been starved for investment.  

Other public and private investment has gone into redevelopment of the Navy Yard into a green industries park and America’s largest urban solar farm, as well as early development of a learning management system for the public schools. For Philadelphia, the payoff from these programs will be in economic growth, but more importantly, in an increase in the percentage of its citizens that participate in the city’s economic success.

Population: 1,500,000

Website: www.phila.gov

Smart21 2006 | 2013 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022

Northeast Ohio is an 18-county region bordering on one of America's Great Lakes to the north and including the major metropolitan center of Cleveland and the cities of Akron, Canton and Youngstown. To Americans of a certain age, the names of those cities tell the tale of the Industrial Age. This region was one of America's great trade and manufacturing centers, a key link in the national transportation system, home to steel companies and the place where Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller made his fortune. Following the Second World War, however, it fell into seemingly unstoppable decline, particularly in the core urban areas, as US manufacturing lost competitiveness in a global market. Amidst rising unemployment, eroding institutions, population loss and racial unrest, the tremendous wealth created in the industrial era was no longer invested in creating new businesses and industries, nor in education and the development of social capital. In 1978, Cleveland became the first US city to default on its creditors since the Great Depression and, in 2004 and 2006, was named America's poorest big city.

Buried Assets

Yet the region retained hidden strengths: world-class health facilities, a vibrant arts culture, three major professional sports teams and respected institutions of higher learning, including Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College. Another major asset was buried in a literal sense. During the 1990s, the telecom industry built out more than $4 trillion of fiber-optic communications systems worldwide. In most cases, these circuits followed the traditional transportation corridors such as rail lines and highways, which meant that Northeast Ohio found itself once again at the hub of a high-capacity transportation network.

In 2002, Case Western named as its new chief information officer a visionary named Lev Gonick. With global technology and community development experience on his resume, he soon began outlining a revolutionary idea. He believed that the region's nonprofit institutions could spearhead development of a common community network that would not only save them money and expand capacity but foster a wide range of innovation collaborations. The vision impressed many regional leaders, notable among them Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell. Case Western and the city assembled a core group of institutions including NorTech (an economic development organization focused on technology), Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland State University, the county library system, the local Public Broadcasting System (PBS) affiliate, and Cleveland's transit authority and school district. These were the founding members of a public-private partnership they called OneCleveland, which was eventually renamed OneCommunity. Under the leadership of its president Scot Rourke, OneCommunity forged partnerships with the region's telephone and cable carriers, under which the carriers donated unused fiber-optic circuits to OneCommunity and OneCommunity contracted for last-mile fiber and VPN services from the carriers.

To make the deal, OneCommunity had to overcome resistance to the creation of what carriers at first viewed as a new competitor. Fortunately, Rourke and his team came from the venture capital industry, which allowed them to talk the language of business plans and return on investment. It also ensured OneCommunity began life with a sustainable business model. Eventually, they persuaded all parties of OneCommunity's essential value: by helping the public and nonprofit sectors become better users of IT and telecom services, OneCommunity would save them money while simultaneously boosting demand across the region. And boost demand it did. Lev Gonick reports that, prior to OneCommunity, Case Western was using about 40 megabits per second of capacity for all of its operations. Within a few years of joining the OneCommunity network, average demand had risen to 400 Mbps. Since start-up, the OneCommunity network has expanded to connect more than 1,500 schools, libraries, governments, hospitals and universities. Its OneClassroom content and digital asset management system connects these users to world-class content from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Orchestra, PBS and other sources. In 2006-07, the network hosted an 18-month program called Voices & Choices, which engaged tens of thousands of area leaders in Web-enabled "town meetings" in order to educate people about the challenges facing the regional economy and obtain their input. Voices & Choices has led to a regional economic development plan called Advance Northeast Ohio, which focuses on business growth and attraction, talent development, inclusion and government collaboration for greater efficiency.

Intensive Collaboration

OneCommunity would be impressive just as a story of network deployment - but it would not have achieved the potential that its creators envisioned. Because OneCommunity's Board is made up of the leading governmental and nonprofit institutions of the region, it became the hub of intensive collaboration. Today, the work of tech-based economic development agency NorTech, for example, is complemented by Team NEO, a joint venture of the largest metro chambers of commerce, which works to attract business investment in targeted sectors. Another nonprofit, JumpStart, provides venture capital to start-up companies with high growth potential. In 2006, it tied for ninth among the 100 most active investors making first-time investments in start-up or early-stage companies, according to Entrepreneur magazine, up from 61st place in 2005. Meanwhile, private investor Morgenthaler Ventures, founded in Cleveland with offices in Silicon Valley's Menlo Park, tied for 11th most active on the Entrepreneur list.

BioEnterprise is another nonprofit partnership, founded by The Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western and Summa Health Systems. It supports business formation, recruitment and acceleration for emerging medical device, biotechnology and health care service firms. Since its founding in 2002, it has created, recruited or accelerated more than 60 companies, helped them attract more than $565 million in funding, and concluded over 225 technology transfer deals with industry partners.

Rebuilding an Entrepreneurial Culture

In November, OneCommunity announced that it would share with the Northeast Ohio Regional Health Information Organization (NEO RHIO) an $11.2 million grant from the US Federal Communications Commission to develop a regional broadband health care network. The network will connect 19 rural hospitals and numerous clinics in 22 counties to over 30 existing hospitals already on the OneCommunity network. The project will enable NEO RHIO and its collaborating medical providers to deliver telemedicine, records access, medical imaging and remote diagnostic services to improve community health care. At the same time, it creates the opportunity for the region to become a center of excellence in the emerging business of electronic patient records management.

The efforts of OneCommunity and its partners are all directed to the same goal: rebuilding the business, political and social culture of entrepreneurship that created the region's Industrial Age prosperity. In the Broadband Economy, that takes a different set of assets and skills, from broadband to partnerships to digital literacy. It also takes long-term investment in human and social capital. But the partners are betting that same spirit that drove the region's earlier success can create a sustainable and inclusive economy in the 21st Century.

Population: 4,600,000

Labor Force: 2,125,400

Website: www.onecommunity.org

Smart21 2008 | 2011

Top7 2008

Small farming community with aggressive re-generation program.

Population: 9,841

Website: www.cityofmonmouth.com

Smart21 2006

Like rural cities around the world, Mitchell has been shaped by the productivity revolution in agriculture. Over the past 80 years, automation has transformed farming from a labor-intensive business to a capital-intensive one employing a tiny percentage of the workforce. The six counties surrounding Mitchell have lost one-third of their population since 1930. The most talented and ambitious are inevitably the first to go.

Vision 2000 and Mitchell Technical Institute

Mitchell began to plan a different future in the late 1980s. A strategic plan called Vision 2000 called for a community-wide emphasis on education, healthcare, infrastructure and recreation. It led to the merger of two hospitals, creating a unified healthcare system that became the city’s biggest employer, and the construction of new schools that partnered with the local university and recreation center to advance educational excellence. Investments in city infrastructure were funded by an increase in the local sales tax.

It was during this period that the local community college, the Mitchell Technical Institute (MTI), began to assume a unique leadership role. MTI and a consulting company, Martin and Associates, developed a plan to create a municipal telephone company to bring advanced services to the city. Put to a vote, the plan was defeated due to concerns about cost fed by the opposition of incumbent providers. But MTI was undeterred. It developed a technology center to serve students and the community, which soon became a collocation facility for communications providers. Through a Federal grant, MTI upgraded it into a Network Operations Center meeting strict industry and government security standards, and the NOC began to host more and more networks including university connections to Internet II. This evidence of demand persuaded regional carriers to expand broadband service, culminating in a 2005 decision by Santel Communications to build a fiber-to-the-premise network.

Investing in the Next Generation

Telecommunications development has created another economy on top of Mitchell’s agricultural one. It consists of engineering, consulting and software companies that have made Mitchell into a regional hub for expertise and services. The city and its institutions have responded by deepening their support for the digital economy. The school system has introduced a 1-to-1 laptop and tablet program for middle and secondary school students, and is piloting mass customized learning.

MTI has invested $40 million in a new technology-based campus, where it trains hundreds of communications and data technicians, while Dakota Wesleyan University has created centers for entrepreneurship and health sciences. A local angel investors network has sprung up and begun incubating new communications startups. So successful has the new economy become that it is attracting new office industries including healthcare support companies Alleviant and Avera Health Systems. Mitchell is responding by partnering with recruitment companies to attract talent from across America to the city. Rather than seeing its population decline, Mitchell has become a Midwest magnet for ICT talent.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Mitchell.

Want to know more about Mitchell?
Mitchell was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 15,254

Website: www.cityofmitchell.org

Smart21 2013 | 2014 | 2015

Top7 2015

Marlborough is the birthplace of Horatio Alger, Jr., the quintessentially American author whose 19th Century books described poor boys who rose from humble backgrounds to middle-class security through hard work, courage and honesty. The city of 38,000 achieved success in that century only to see its industrial base erode in the late 20th Century – before it was rescued by the construction of major highway networks including the Massachusetts Turnpike and Interstate 495.

Technology Campuses

These made Marlborough an attractive location for the information technology industry that sprang up around Boston in the Eighties and Nineties. Both Digital Equipment and Hewlett Packard established large corporate campuses in the city, which continues to attract high-tech companies like SanDisk and Cavium, biotech leaders like GE Healthcare Life Sciences and Boston Scientific, and manufacturing giants like Raytheon and Dow Chemical. In 2015, the city had an unemployment rate of 3.7%, down sharply from 2012 and a full point lower than the state average. Over that three-year period, Marlborough gained 6,000 jobs, of which 5,000 resulted from inward investment.

Career Pathways

The city is working now to solidify its success. It has partnered with two other school districts to create the Massachusetts Advanced Pathways Program. Using a US$1.8 million grant from the state, it works with state and local employers, educators and nonprofits to design career pathways that meet labor market demands and link rigorous academics with career-focused learning. The program focuses on healthcare and technology. Launched in 2014-15, it has so far enabled 10 STEM-based summer internships and enrolled nearly two dozen students in computer science, engineering and biotech programs.

Health Care and Sustainability

The public library system provides access to computers and connectivity for patrons and, in a two-month sample period, hosted over 8,000 user sessions. An Alert Portal system keeps thousands of resident up to date by text, email and phone messages on community activities, weather emergencies and transportation issues. The city has also worked closely with local charitable foundations and the Marlborough Hospital to create a $12.7 million state of the art cancer facility, which opened in 2013. The design process made heavy use of 3D computer models to give hospital staff input to the layout of patient rooms, handling of medical waste and walking distance to treatment rooms.

City residents, business leaders and government have also rallied around a Sustainability Action Plan. It calls for environmental education, energy efficiency and the tracking of energy use and waste in the public school system. A partnership with the utility National Grid provides the expertise, and volunteers provide fund-raising, staffing and leadership of the ongoing effort. While Horatio Alger’s characters depended on their own resources, Marlborough in the 20th Century has engaged the entire community in ensuring a prosperous and sustainable future.

Population: 38,499

Website: www.marlborough-ma.gov

Smart21 2016

A small city east of Los Angeles, Loma Linda established an advanced broadband standard for new construction and pooled public and private investment to deploy a network that has attracted businesses and boosted both retail sales and home values in the community.

Population: 22,000

Website: www.lomalinda-ca.gov

Smart21 2007

Dubuque is a city of middle America, surrounded by farmland, with a central business district beside the Mississippi River. And in recent decades, it has received the brunt of the brutal economic changes brought by automation and ICT productivity gains. In the 80s, its largest employer laid off half of its workforce in Dubuque. This, together with the decline of family farming, drove unemployment to 23%, the highest in the nation, in succeeding years.

Sustainable Dubuque

In response, the Mayor and City Council led a broad-based effort to forge a new vision for the city’s future. The result was Sustainable Dubuque, a commitment to create a prosperous, livable and equitable community. The vision spawned multiple efforts. One is a set of smart city projects covering water use, electricity use and public transit. Working with IBM, the city installed sensors, connectivity and software to analyze performance and provide data to users. Starting with 300 homes, the smart water system is now available citywide and is credited with a 7% reduction in water use and an eightfold gain in the detection and fixing of leaks. It has also reduced water treatment costs by $65,000 and increased water revenues by nearly $185,000. The smart travel program tracks 1,500 riders and uses the data to set policies that have produced a 28% increase in ridership over 4 years.

Putting Dubuque to Work

Dubuque Works is a workforce program that unites government, business and educators to enhance the city’s human capital, conduct joint research to develop evidence-based recommendations, and provide outreach to guide area students from school to work. Over the past four years, the program has created more than 5,000 jobs and Dubuque, with just 3% of the state’s population, has been responsible for 10% of the state’s job growth. These different initiatives have attracted more than $37 million in Federal and state grants, which the city has used to stimulate additional workforce development and sustainability efforts. Dubuque’s revival is a work in progress but its early successes create confidence in a more prosperous, equitable and sustainable future.

Population: 58,253

Website: www.cityofdubuque.org

Smart21 2015

The small city of Dublin traces its roots to 1810, and its name to a surveyor who came to America from that fabled Irish capital. It was a quiet town until the 1970s, when an interstate highway connected it to the region and a new golf club gave people a reason to go there. Located near the state capital of Columbus, it evolved into an affluent bedroom community – and might have remained so if not for an investment that was new for its time.

Most American cities and towns fund themselves on property and sales taxes, but Dublin has a local income tax. It provides a dependable stream of revenue that allows the city to invest for the long term. One of those investments has become a connecting thread that unifies and powers its other economic and social assets. They call it DubLink.

A Network is Born

Following telecommunications deregulation in 1996, Dublin began installing a network of underground conduit to encourage deployment of broadband by private carriers. A public-private partnership with the Fishel Company soon followed, and by 2003, Dublin had built and installed optical fiber in the DubLink network. It was justified in part by the ability to offer high-speed, high-quality connections among city facilities, sharply reducing telecom costs. But it also opened the door to providing affordable high-capacity connectivity to corporations that had chosen Dublin for their home or regional offices, including Cardinal Health, Quantum Health and the Wendy’s fast-food chain.

As Dublin installed more and more fiber in its conduits, it began doing capacity-sharing deals other public and public-private entities. DubLink interconnected with Columbus FiberNet, which reaches into cities across the Columbus Capital Region. It partnered with the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), carrying some of the traffic on OSC's 1,600-mile fiber backbone. In return, the OSC and Dublin joined forces to create OARnet, a fiber infrastructure connecting governments, schools and businesses to Ohio colleges, universities, research institutes and Federal labs. Other fiber transport partnerships included Central Ohio Broadband, linking with other cities that have developed fiber networks, and agreements with two carrier hotels in Columbus to exchange traffic in return for giving DubLink customers connection to global carriers.

Invisible Infrastructure

Connectivity – and Dublin’s skill at negotiating capacity-sharing deals – paid dividends. The Supercomputer Center and OARnet gave Dublin schools, businesses and institutions access to next-gen networking technologies and massive data-center capacity. Dublin uses DubLink as a backbone for e-government services and a Wi-Fi network, for which it builds and manages hardware while a private company provides services. The city uses the network for mobile computing by its first responders and field staff, fleet monitoring of snowplows and other city vehicles, and video monitoring of traffic. It also supports city-sponsored cultural events, like the Dublin Irish Festival weekends and the Jack Nicklaus' PGA Memorial Tournament, taking place in that golf club founded in the Seventies.

From its founding, DubLink maintained a bright line between public and private use because municipalities operating their own networks have frequently been the target of lawsuits by private-sector carriers. The city delivered no services except for its own government traffic, and leased conduit space or its own fiber to carriers serving the business market. When, in 2022, it requested proposals for construction of a fiber-to-the-home network for residents, it stuck to the same strategy. The plan called for the city to invest several million dollars in the project, but for the network to be built and operated by a private carrier.

Dublin retained an experienced consultant to review the submissions, guide contract negotiations and monitor the planning and construction by the winning bidder. That winner was altafiber, formerly one of the Bell operating companies, which gained a 15-year operating agreement. Construction began in April 2024 and was substantially completed in December 2025, one year ahead of schedule. More than 15,000 Dublin homes gained access to bandwidth of up to 10 gigabits – and just as important to Dublin’s future, the real estate development community gained a high-value amenity for their projects.

Entrepreneurial Opportunity

It takes more than data pipes, however, to build a competitive economy. Applying the same skill it brought to leveraging DubLink, the city has dedicated itself to building an entrepreneurial economy that can deliver new sources of growth and both attract and retain talent.

Its first initiatives go back as far as 2009, when it opened the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center (DEC) and invested US$625,000 to attract a regional nonprofit accelerator called TechColumbus (now known as Rev1 Ventures) to energize it. DEC is now home to an average of 50 companies and support organizations, including the Center for Innovative Food Technology, the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition and Dublin’s own Center for Global Business Development.  Within the first 10 years, the city’s investment in TechColumbus yielded nearly $15 million in investment, debt financing and new revenue.

This ongoing commitment to support and strengthen entrepreneurship helps explain why there are more than 4,000 companies in Dublin, with an average of just seven employees each, despite the city’s success in hosting facilities for multinational corporations. It also accounts for the fact that this city of 50,000 has a daytime population exceeding 70,000.

Nonetheless, Dublin still benefits from proximity to Columbus, the state capital, with its many colleges and universities. Eighty percent of residents have a bachelor’s or graduate degree. But Dublin’s leaders understand the vital importance of creating a workforce that meets the specific needs of its major employers and fast-growing entrepreneurial companies.

The city began by hosting a series of education and business roundtables, which led to an annual Business-Education Summit on Workforce Development. Among other results, the effort led to a partnership between the state-sponsored BioOhio program and Dublin’s Tolles Technical & Career Center for the creation of a biotechnology program, and another between the city and the Columbus State Center for Workforce Development to bring targeted training programs to the city.

The Bridge Street District

Dublin’s Historic District is rich in character and continues to evolve alongside the community’s forward-looking vision. Anticipating demographic shifts, the city planned the Bridge Street District as a vibrant extension of downtown. The District brings together residential, commercial, dining and entertainment experiences in a connected, pedestrian-friendly setting – positioning Dublin to meet the needs of a dynamic, modern workforce.

The Bridge Street District brings that vision to life as a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood featuring a blend of residential, office, dining and retail spaces, complemented by parkland on both sides of the Scioto River. Largely completed in 2020, the district has proven highly successful, spurring continued expansion and investment. Today, it serves not only as a dynamic destination, but also as a visible hub for Dublin’s next generation of innovators.

Building on this momentum, the newly announced Riverview Village is planned as a dedicated innovation hub that brings together entrepreneurs, startups and business leaders in a collaborative, flexible environment. Designed to foster connection and creativity, the space will serve as a welcoming destination for the broader community - blending workspace, gathering areas and programming to support both economic growth and community engagement.

Healthcare Advances

Healthcare has been a particular beneficiary of Dublin’s high level of connectivity and the anchoring presence of Cardinal Health, a Fortune 17 provider of healthcare management services. OhioHealth, a nonprofit network of hospitals and healthcare facilities, uses DubLink and partner networks to connect is corporate headquarters and five major hospitals and billing centers across Central Ohio. Its innovative Dublin Methodist Hospital employs technology to create a completely digital, wireless and near-paperless environment that better serves patients while increasing productivity. It was named one of the “Most Wired” hospitals in America by Hospitals and Health Networks magazine.

Innovation is not restricted to in-patient care. Outpatient Care Dublin, an extension of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, receives nearly 1,000 visits per weekday from residents of Dublin and surrounding communities. It offers 22 different specialties, from allergy and immunology to cardiology, diabetes and endocrinology, at a fraction of the cost of a visit to OSU’s center in Columbus. 

In April 2025, Mount Carmel Dublin opened a 35-acre, state-of-the-art medical campus with 60 inpatient beds; emergency care; and cardiology, neurology, orthopedics, primary care and surgical services for the community. This makes Dublin home to all four major health systems in central Ohio, turning the City into a healthcare magnet in the Columbus Capital Region

Regional Development

Dublin is also a leading member of the public-private partnership that has created the 33 Smart Mobility Corridor. Between Columbus and East Liberty, U.S Route 33 is home to one of the largest manufacturing clusters currently active in the state, with more than 250 companies, 66 of which are automotive-related firms. To retain and attract businesses working on smart mobility, the City of Dublin, the City of Marysville, the Union County Port Authority, and Union County established the NW 33 Innovation Corridor Council of Governments (COG). Unifying the assets of the region under one banner allowed the COG to vie for funding opportunities that would traditionally be out of reach.

The council installed a fiber network along the 35 miles of interstate between Columbus and East Liberty. The network runs from the Metro Data Center in Dublin over the DubLink network into neighboring Marysville and the Honda America plant, and to a transportation research center.  It hosts short-range communications equipment in nearly 100 locations that communicates with 1,200 public and private test vehicles to evaluate con­nected vehicle applications, autonomous technologies, and traffic man­agement applications. It also serves most companies and a new R&D office park within the corridor.

This concentration of companies and technology infrastructure enabled COG to secure a US$6 million grant from the US Department of Transportation. This Federal seal of approval soon sparked more than $200 million in state, local and private investment. It also attracted the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center, in partnership with Ohio State University, to launch a research program developing low-altitude air traffic management technology using passive radar, which reads radio reflections from existing transmitters rather than generating its own. The use of passive radar has the potential to drastically reduce the cost of creating systems to monitor small aircraft, helicopters and drones operating at low altitude.

Dublin has long held a reputation as a well-planned community, grounded in a deliberate, long-term approach to growth. Through both strong and challenging economic cycles, the city has consistently assembled the key elements of a thriving innovation economy – one that now extends across the region. This strategy continues to position Dublin as a forward-thinking, resilient community built for sustained success.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Dublin.

Want to know more about Dublin?
Dublin was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 49,000

Labor Force: 75,000

Website: dublinohiousa.gov

Smart21 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

Top7 2010 | 2011