The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a nice piece out examining many of the same issues we looked at in Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America's Slow Leak in Job Creation but from a five state perspective.  I particularly enjoyed their interviews with some local entrepreneurs and service providers to provide additional reaction and context to some of their findings.  The five states they examine, because of their geographic responsibilities, are quite interesting on this topic - Minnesota and Wisconsin (not doing that well) and North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana (doing better).  But even those states doing OK by the measures examined are only just holding steady.  Indeed, it's not that you're seeing better survival rates, better job creation, or better numbers of starts but that those things are trending down for the latter states.  This piece is worth a read and if you're doing a similar type of analysis at the regional level in the U.S. please let me know.  

I just came across a blog from the Guardian, DataBlog, which could give way to hours or days of exploration - if only I had that luxury.  Perhaps my only complaint is that DataBlog seems to be covering everything and in every direction.  They have a database of databases that cuts across countries and topics from business registrations to abortion.  But as such, it's ironic that I'd find out about a major U.S. database on a U.K.-based site but that's just how the world works these days.  

The new database is from the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) and provides state-level details about every declared emergency since 1953 in the United States by type of emergency (tornado, flood, etc.).  If you were wondering, Texas looks to hold the title of most declared emergencies in that time period at 3,293 - mostly hurricane related.  I can only imagine that this data will lead to finer-grained forthcoming data about these emergencies at a more local level or more metadata about the emergencies at the state level.  

So what does this have to do with entrepreneurship and innovation?  Well, it's probably more of interest to entrepreneurship scholars but from my perspective there remains opportunity to tell the story of how businesses rebuild, new businesses come in, and the general business dynamics recover after natural disasters.  The existing FEMA data looks to lend itself well to potential marriage with other data now available tracking cohorts of businesses over time at the state level that are available from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Indeed, in my opinion, we are going to be seeing a lot of research looking at state-level impacts on entrepreneurship in the coming years.  I know I've reviewed two such papers this month, both of very good quality that make use of the confidential Kauffman Firm Survey data file.

Two additional concluding thoughts:

1. I'm introducing a new tag - state - in my tag cloud to start tracking state-level data sources which I come across.
2. On the very important topic of what we know about entrepreneurship and natural disasters, if you've got research or data in this area, please let me know as we get a lot of media requests on this topic, and it'd be great to be able to point to some quality academic work in this area.