Connections -- virtual, physical, personal -- build an information economy ecosystem

Last Tuesday, I stood in a crowded coworking space in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, watching a ribbon cutting. The occasion was the expansion of eMYRge, a city-supported coworking and entrepreneurial hub that had just doubled its footprint. The new space brought eMYRge to roughly 10,000 square feet, adding offices and room for a growing community of entrepreneurs. Even before the ribbon was cut, all of the new, long-term, private offices had been leased.

2026-08-28

There was also a graduation taking place that evening. Ten young companies had spent the previous 12 weeks participating in Launchpad, Myrtle Beach's first startup incubator program, and their founders took turns pitching from the stage. They weren't competing for an investment check. The pitches were instead a public introduction of sorts: entrepreneurs explaining what they were building to a room filled with people who had increasingly come to see entrepreneurship as part of the city's economic future.

The combination was fitting. One graduation was explicit: a group of founders completing a program intended to help them build companies. But there was evidence of another kind of graduation nearby. TransPerfect Legal, the global language and technology company, had established a Myrtle Beach presence at eMYRge and subsequently grown beyond the coworking environment, purchasing its own downtown property as its local operation expanded. The point of a publicly supported coworking space, after all, is not to keep successful companies inside forever. Success is when they leave.

I had seen pieces of this story before.

Two years earlier, my organization, RIoT, was hired by the City of Myrtle Beach's economic development team to help think through the foundations of a technology-based economic development strategy, particularly one centered on startups and entrepreneurship. At the time, eMYRge already existed. The city had made the investment, entrepreneurs had a place to work, and the commitment to the idea was real. But activity had not yet reached the level city leaders hoped to see.

Our conversations therefore weren't primarily about the coworking space. They were about everything around it.

What incubators and accelerators existed to help companies develop? Who were the community's conveners? The people and organizations capable of getting entrepreneurs into the same room repeatedly. Where would those gatherings occur? Were there formal event spaces, but also informal places where people could encounter one another? Were there coffee shops, restaurants and parks within walking distance? Were universities, established businesses and investors connected to entrepreneurs? Was there a rhythm of meetups and events that would give someone a reason to participate not once, but again and again?

The discussion was really about a system.

Two years later, standing inside an eMYRge that had doubled in size and watching its first incubator cohort graduate, I was seeing some of that system taking shape. The following morning provided another glimpse. I attended Myrtle Beach's weekly 1 Million Cups gathering, part of the national entrepreneurial program built around founders presenting their companies over coffee. The room was remarkably full. Myrtle Beach's chapter has developed a reputation as one of the program's most active communities.

None of these things, considered individually, would constitute an economic development strategy. Together, however, they begin to look like one.

Infrastructure is not an economy

I've spent a fair amount of time recently writing about infrastructure for the emerging Data Economy, particularly the rapid construction of data centers and the difficult questions communities face as they decide how these facilities fit into their economic futures. But data centers are only the newest layer of digital infrastructure. Long before communities began debating where AI computation should occur, they were confronting a similar question around broadband.

Myrtle Beach has an interesting advantage in that regard. Horry Telephone Cooperative, or HTC, has built an extensive fiber network throughout the region. As a cooperative, HTC has an unusually local relationship with the economy its network serves. A new company created in Myrtle Beach isn't merely an abstract contribution to regional economic growth; it is also a potential new HTC customer. A stronger local economy produces more businesses, more households and more demand for the infrastructure the cooperative has already built.

That alignment has helped make HTC more than a utility provider. The cooperative contributed financially to the creation of the HTC Aspire Hub that houses eMYRge and has supported the entrepreneurial activity surrounding it. It is an investment in activating its own infrastructure.

There is a striking parallel about 150 miles north in Wilson, North Carolina.

Wilson is a city of roughly 50,000 people that made a consequential decision two decades ago to build its own municipal fiber network, Greenlight. Myrtle Beach has a full-time population of only about 40,000, notwithstanding the much larger population that arrives with its enormous tourism industry. These are not Austin and Boston. They are relatively small cities attempting to participate deliberately in an economy increasingly organized around technology and data.

Wilson's Greenlight network gave the city exceptional digital infrastructure, but city leaders gradually recognized that connectivity alone was not an economic development strategy. Wilson subsequently developed the Gig East Exchange coworking space downtown and invested in programming designed to bring entrepreneurs into it. RIoT began operating startup programming in Wilson, including accelerator activity, and the city developed the annual Gig East Summit as a gathering point around entrepreneurship, arts, science and technology.

Greenlight has invested financially in this activity for much the same reason HTC has done so in Myrtle Beach. Municipal fiber and cooperative fiber are different ownership models, but they share an important characteristic: their economic incentives are unusually tied to the places they serve.

A national telecommunications company certainly benefits when a community grows. But its capital can flow across thousands of markets. Greenlight cannot move its fiber network from Wilson to Charlotte because Charlotte is growing faster. HTC cannot relocate the fiber buried beneath Horry County to a more promising market in Texas. Their infrastructure is geographically anchored, which gives both organizations a particularly direct interest in helping the economies sitting above that infrastructure become more productive.

That distinction shouldn't be interpreted as an argument that municipal or cooperative broadband is inherently better than commercial broadband. Rather, it illustrates something important about economic development: infrastructure is most powerful when the institutions surrounding it have incentives to activate it.

Building the connections

The traditional concept of infrastructure tends to emphasize things that can be built and photographed. Roads, airports, industrial parks, fiber networks and, increasingly, data centers are obvious examples. Coworking facilities fit comfortably into this category as well. They have square footage, construction budgets and ribbon cuttings.

Technology-based economic development requires another kind of infrastructure that is harder to see. In previous articles, I’ve described this as institutional infrastructure.

Accelerators and incubators are part of it. So are mentors, entrepreneurial support organizations, universities, workforce programs and capital networks. Conferences and pitch events matter. So do the people who organize a meetup every Wednesday morning even when only a handful of people initially attend.

There is another layer that is easier to overlook because we generally categorize it as quality of life rather than economic infrastructure. Entrepreneurs need places to encounter one another. A downtown coffee shop can be part of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. So can a park, a brewery or a walkable block connecting a coworking space to restaurants and other businesses. Some interactions can be engineered through accelerators and conferences. Others emerge simply because the same people keep finding themselves in the same places.

Fiber connects machines. Entrepreneurial ecosystems connect people. Both networks become more useful as the number and density of connections increase.

This helps explain why simply constructing a coworking space rarely produces immediate results. A beautiful building filled with desks is still just a building. An accelerator disconnected from entrepreneurs, mentors and potential customers is simply a curriculum. A broadband network without businesses using it is underutilized infrastructure. Economic value begins to emerge from the connections among them.

Cocoflo offers an interesting example of how those connections can extend beyond a single city. The Canadian technology company participated in a RIoT Accelerator cohort several years ago while exploring the U.S. market for its public-sector technology platform. As part of its customer discovery, RIoT introduced the company to Myrtle Beach. That relationship continued developing as Myrtle Beach's entrepreneurial activity expanded. Cocoflo ultimately chose to establish its U.S. headquarters in Myrtle Beach.

That isn't the traditional economic development story of a community winning a corporate relocation through a large incentive package. It is something more organic. A company encountered a community through an entrepreneurial network, developed relationships there, watched the ecosystem evolve and eventually decided that it wanted to become part of it.

This is what technology-based economic development can look like before it becomes large enough to appear prominently in economic statistics.

The patience problem

There is an uncomfortable reality about this kind of economic development: at the beginning, success can look remarkably unimpressive.

Imagine organizing the first entrepreneurial meetup in a smaller city and six people arrive. By the standards we often use to measure economic development, six people gathering for coffee is meaningless. There is no announcement of hundreds of jobs. No factory is breaking ground. No governor is arriving with an oversized pair of scissors.

But if those six people return the next week, something has happened.

Perhaps eight attend the time after that. One is an entrepreneur. Another works for an established local company that eventually becomes the entrepreneur's first customer. Someone knows a software developer looking for a new opportunity. Another knows a banker willing to explain what financing might be available. Months later, one of those founders hires an employee. Eventually, a successful entrepreneur becomes a mentor for the next company. This accumulation is difficult to capture in a ribbon cutting because it doesn't happen all at once.

Technology-based economic development requires patience precisely because ecosystems compound. The first investment makes the second somewhat more useful. A coworking space makes an accelerator easier to operate. An accelerator produces companies that need coworking space. Those companies give mentors and investors a reason to participate. Regular meetups make the community easier for newcomers to enter. Successful founders become mentors, customers and perhaps eventually investors themselves.

At some point, the pieces stop merely adding to one another and begin multiplying one another. Wilson has had considerably more time to experience that process. Myrtle Beach is earlier in its journey, which is part of what made returning there this week so interesting. I wasn't looking at a finished entrepreneurial ecosystem. There may be no such thing. I was seeing the early signs that a collection of investments was beginning to behave like a system.

Graduating from the infrastructure

This is why the stories of companies leaving a coworking space deserve as much attention as the companies moving into one. Municipally supported entrepreneurial facilities sometimes face a peculiar measurement problem. A full building looks successful. An empty office looks unsuccessful. But if the mission is economic development, occupancy isn't really the ultimate metric. Graduation is.

A company should enter when it is small, when flexibility and inexpensive space matter disproportionately. Ideally, it finds other entrepreneurs nearby. It encounters mentors, potential employees and customers. Perhaps it participates in an accelerator or presents at 1 Million Cups. It begins hiring. Eventually, the company needs something the coworking facility can no longer provide.

Then it moves down the street. Now it leases or purchases private real estate. Its employees buy lunch downtown. The company pays taxes, purchases professional services and creates jobs. Its departure from the entrepreneurial facility makes room for another company to begin the process.

Seen this way, eMYRge isn't simply a coworking space. It is one piece of an economic development pipeline. The same is true of the Gig East Exchange in Wilson. The economic development objective shouldn't be to fill these facilities permanently. It should be to create enough throughput that they need to keep finding room for the next generation.

The least expensive infrastructure may be the part we underfund

There is another lesson here that may be particularly relevant as communities across the country consider enormous new investments in the infrastructure of the Data Economy. Physical infrastructure is expensive. Fiber networks can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Buildings require substantial capital. Data centers are measured in hundreds of millions or billions.

Institutional infrastructure can be remarkably inexpensive by comparison.

A meetup doesn't cost much. Neither does a pitch night. Even a professionally operated accelerator serving a small cohort of companies represents a modest investment compared with constructing a building or laying miles of fiber. Mentorship, founder introductions and recurring community gatherings can often be created for a fraction of what communities routinely spend on traditional economic development infrastructure.

Yet these are the investments that help activate everything else.

There is something peculiar about spending millions of dollars building infrastructure and then becoming reluctant to spend thousands activating it. We wouldn't build a park and expect that the existence of grass and sidewalks alone would create a thriving civic gathering place. Parks require maintenance, programming and people who give residents reasons to use them. Entrepreneurial infrastructure isn't fundamentally different.

This is especially important for smaller communities that look at places such as Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin or North Carolina's Research Triangle and conclude that they could never assemble comparable technology economies. They are probably right. But they don't need to.

Wilson did not need to recreate Research Triangle Park. Myrtle Beach does not need to become Austin. The objective is to establish enough connected pieces that a local system can begin producing momentum of its own.

That might start with broadband. It might start with a coworking space. It could begin with a university, a community college, an unusually committed group of business leaders or simply six people willing to meet for coffee every Wednesday morning. Different communities will assemble the pieces in different orders.

What matters is understanding that none of those pieces is the economy by itself.

This week's ribbon cutting in Myrtle Beach celebrated another 5,000 square feet of physical infrastructure. But what interested me most wasn't the additional space. It was everything happening around it: offices already occupied, entrepreneurs completing an incubator, a crowded 1 Million Cups gathering the following morning, companies growing beyond the facility and another company that encountered Myrtle Beach through an accelerator elsewhere and ultimately decided to make the city its home.

Two years ago, Myrtle Beach had many of the pieces. Today, more of them are connected. Wilson offers a glimpse of what can happen when a community keeps making those connections over many years.

Neither city's work is finished, and neither provides a formula that another community can simply copy. Their experiences instead suggest something more encouraging for the hundreds of small and midsized American communities wondering how they can participate in the next economy.

Start with the infrastructure you have. Identify what is missing around it. Create places for people to collide. Give entrepreneurs reasons to return. Celebrate the first six people who show up rather than wondering why there weren't 60. Connect the pieces, and then keep showing up long enough for those connections to compound.

Infrastructure can be built on a construction schedule. An economy cannot.