Innovation Report Details Ups and Downs of San Diego Startups

$193 million into 26 startups in the San Diego region during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to the most recent MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson/Reuters. That was a 43 percent drop in dollars invested and a 25 percent decline in the number of deals compared with the fourth quarter of 2009.

— When using a moving average of three quarters’ data (which smooths quarter-to-quarter fluctuations for a clearer trend analysis), San Diego’s fourth quarter VC investment moving average was down more than 50 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007—a substantially larger decrease than seen in other key innovation economies, such as Silicon Valley and Boston.

—Overall tech employment has decreased about 2 percent in San Diego over the past three years, with a slight uptick noted in the fourth quarter of 2010. Recent employment data shows San Diego added about 2,000 jobs of all types in February, but overall unemployment remains high at 10.1 percent.

—San Diego’s new tech companies created almost 200 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2010, and more than 930 for the full year 2010. Overall startup employment was down 13 percent from 2009, however. For the entire year, the life sciences sector created the most jobs (303), followed by software (243), computer and electronics (150), communications (120), environmental technologies (64), and other (50).

— Communications equipment manufacturing was again the largest employment sector in San Diego with almost 28,000 jobs. The life sciences sector and software each represented 27,400 jobs. These tech sectors represent only 6 percent of employers and just over 11 percent of all jobs in San Diego County. But the report notes that tech employment accounts for more than 25 percent of all wages and pays almost 95 percent more than the average industry wage in San Diego.

—San Diego continues to lead Southern California in terms of the patents published and granted per 100,000 residents over the past three years. San Diego also shows higher year-to-year growth in the number of patents published and granted between 2008 and 2010 compared to other California regions and the Boston innovation hub. Over the past three years, the number of patents published increased by more than 12 percent, and the number of patent grants jumped by more than 45 percent in San Diego.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.