Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiMIchael
My point is more ambitious. It would be nice to see Chicago the epicenter of a booming new industry instead of merely just finding footing. Even heavily consolidating a legacy industry would be nice.
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I want to clarify what you mean here by way of examples. Are you referring to things like Seattle's dominance in cloud software (Microsoft/Amazon/Tableau/Concur/etc.) and San Fran's ownership of the app-based economy (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/Netflix/etc.)?
It's an interesting concept, I think you could make an argument that logistics and food/agricuture-tech are two areas that Chicago is a clear leader. Logistics is kind of booming, but by it's nature doesn't necessarily centralize a bunch of jobs in one location. The food and agriculture scene is pretty hot right now (ADM, Con Agra and McDonald's moving to the city, Home Chef selling to Kroger, GrubHub is both food and logistics, RXBar selling)
Advanced manufacturing (DMDII) and healthcare/biotech are probably the next closest. I know lots of people in the local tech industry want Chicago to be the center of the B2B software world. Which makes sense due to the concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the area that a startup could sell software to.