While many entrepreneurs recently moved to the state, Texas has long been a source of innovation with companies like Dell Technologies and ExxonMobil having been founded here.
About the map
This visualization aims to identify which counties in Texas have been leading the charge in innovation and entrepreneurship. We take three different factors into consideration in our analysis: number of new companies per capita, number of small business loans per capita, and number of patents awarded per capita. A shade closer to green on the map implies a stronger entrepreneurship score.
We also created various ways to interact and customize this map. Firstly, users can go back in time until 1990 using the ‘Years’ slider to see how entrepreneurship patterns changed across Texas in these 30 years. Also, you can customize how much weight each of our three metrics has on the final score. They all start weighted equally, but if for example you want to see only the Number of Patents considered, just change the weights of the other 2 metrics to 0.
About the Trends graph
In this graph, you can examine how entrepreneurship developed in each Texas country from 1990 to 2020. In the County drop-down selector, search and select for the county of interest.
Each row within the graph represents one of the three factors we considered most important to measure entrepreneurship: Small business loans, new companies created, and patents awarded.
The gray lines represent averages among all Texas countries.
Our analysis
Through our analysis, we have found that the counties located in large cities, such as Travis County with Austin or Collin County with Dallas, were the leaders in entrepreneurship when equally weighting the three variables across all 28 years of our data. It is interesting to note that counties in West Texas like Midland County and Martin County were leaders when it came to pure market entry. Additionally, we saw a trend in small business loans being taken out in the northern and central regions of Texas.
