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Cincinnati Business Has Everything It Needs—Except Urgency
When it comes to business potential, Cincinnati business is punching below its weight.
We’re home to seven Fortune 500 companies, including Procter & Gamble, Kroger, Fifth Third Bank, and Cintas. Our central location puts us within a day’s drive of 60% of the U.S. population. We’ve got a thriving logistics sector, major universities like the University of Cincinnati and Xavier, and a cost of living that undercuts nearly every comparable market.
But when national rankings come out, we’re never at the top.
Why?
Because despite the assets, we’re still not seen as a city built for growth. We’re seen as affordable, functional, legacy—but not dynamic.
That’s a branding problem. And an alignment problem.
It’s Not a Resource Problem—It’s a Cincinnati Business Mindset Problem
Cincinnati business growth is being held back by cultural habits:
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Short-term thinking. Public money chases ribbon-cuttings and art grants, not foundational infrastructure or innovation.
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Overreliance on nonprofits. Philanthropic groups get more attention than startups. This creates a risk-averse civic culture.
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Lack of collaboration. The private sector is powerful, but disconnected. Mid-size firms are thriving—but working in silos.
Meanwhile, cities like Columbus and Indianapolis are pulling ahead by acting with urgency, speaking with one voice, and investing with intent.
The Private Sector Is Strong—But Quiet
Cincinnati Business has capital. We have national brands, mid-market acquirers, industrial giants, and health-tech clusters. But what we lack is a shared vision.
There’s no unified growth strategy across companies, industries, and institutions. The result? Missed opportunities to compete for federal innovation dollars, venture capital funding, or global brand attention.
What Growth Cities Are Doing That We Aren’t
To catch up—and leap ahead—we need to:
1. Launch a Serious Regional Venture Fund
Cincinnati Business already has a foundation for early-stage capital—Queen City Angels (QCA), CincyTech, and Narya Capital are all doing meaningful work. But if we’re serious about building a nationally recognized innovation economy, we need to scale that foundation—fast.
QCA is one of the top-ranked angel groups in the country, with a long track record of mentoring and funding startups across sectors. CincyTech, backed by both state and private capital, has been instrumental in funding and supporting healthcare and tech ventures across the region. And Narya Capital, co-founded by J.D. Vance and based right here in Cincinnati, brings nearly $100 million in fund size and access to major national LPs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
All three have helped seed a real ecosystem—but none are operating at the kind of seed-to-growth scale that changes a city’s trajectory the way Drive Capital has in Columbus. Drive manages over $2 billion in assets, tells a compelling Midwest growth story, and writes Series A and B checks that let startups stay in-region and scale.
That’s what Cincinnati still needs:
A bold, founder-focused fund with $100M+ in assets, backed by the city’s most powerful institutions—P&G, Fifth Third, Western & Southern, and Cincinnati’s top family offices. A fund that doesn’t replace QCA, CincyTech, or Narya—but builds on their momentum and brings it to the national stage.
The pieces are here. But if we want to keep founders, attract top-tier talent, and compete with cities like Columbus or Nashville, we need more than early-stage capital. We need a cohesive venture strategy that scales with the city’s ambition.
2. Make Startups Part of the Real Economy
Right now, too many entrepreneurs in Cincinnati spend more time chasing pitch competitions, grant applications, and innovation “showcases” than they do building real companies. That’s not their fault—it’s a reflection of the system we’ve built.
We’ve created an ecosystem where startups are treated more like nonprofit programs than future employers. They’re celebrated in newsletters, invited to panels, and given gift-sized grants—but rarely funded at the level needed to scale, hire, and export value from the region.
Other cities—like Indianapolis, Columbus, and even Tulsa—have made a deliberate shift: they treat their startups as part of the core business infrastructure, not as side projects. They connect founders to workforce pipelines, integrate them into real estate planning, and back them with public-private funding strategies that reflect their role as job creators and wealth multipliers.
If Cincinnati is serious about economic growth, we need to stop asking founders to survive on exposure, and start giving them the tools to compete.
That means:
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Lining up local procurement pipelines (get them real customers early)
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Reforming how public funds are allocated (less focus on optics, more on output)
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Embedding startups into city planning and hiring strategies (especially in smart logistics, clean manufacturing, civic tech, and digital health)
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Letting capital—not committees—pick the winners
Startups aren’t side quests. They’re how economies evolve. It’s time Cincinnati started treating them like it.
3. Market the Region Like a Brand
Right now, Cincinnati’s business narrative is invisible to the outside world—and uninspiring to many inside it. Our marketing efforts are fragmented, cautious, and focused more on tourism than traction. We have convention brochures, regional taglines, and slick city videos—but no clear, compelling brand identity as a business hub.
If we want to compete for talent, capital, and attention, we need to market Cincinnati the way a startup would market a product: with clarity, edge, and urgency.
Nashville is a prime example. Over the past decade, they’ve built a brand around growth, culture, and momentum—backed by aggressive campaigns targeting founders, venture capitalists, and corporate relocations. Their pitch isn’t just “great quality of life”—it’s “this is where the future is going.”
Compare that to Cincinnati. When we talk about ourselves, we default to “affordable,” “livable,” and “centrally located.” Those are fine selling points—but they’re not differentiators. They sound like consolation prizes.
We need a bold, unified message that tells the world what Cincinnati is becoming—not just what it has been.
That means:
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Creating a clear economic identity. Are we a logistics capital? A smart manufacturing hub? A B2B tech corridor? Choose and own it.
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Building a founder-facing campaign that targets Midwest expats, coastal investors, and next-gen entrepreneurs looking for cities where they can lead—not follow.
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Rallying our corporations to tell a unified story. P&G, Kroger, Fifth Third, Western & Southern—these brands already dominate national channels. Why not syndicate the Cincinnati message through them?
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Investing in national media presence. Podcast ad buys, targeted digital campaigns, VC conference activations. Not just showing up—standing out.
Cities like Austin, Denver, and Nashville didn’t become magnets for innovation by accident. They picked a story, sold it relentlessly, and backed it with results.
If Cincinnati wants to be in that conversation, it needs to stop selling itself as “surprisingly good”—and start positioning itself as undeniably next.
4. Tie Workforce Development to Founders, Not Just Legacy Employers
Cincinnati’s workforce development model still leans heavily on one outdated assumption: that the goal is to prepare people to get hired by someone else.
Our pipelines—from high school career tracks to college partnerships to city-funded training programs—are overwhelmingly designed to feed legacy employers: the Procters, the Fifth Thirds, the Krogers. And while those institutions are critical to our economy, they’re not where net new growth is going to come from.
What we’re missing is a workforce strategy that teaches people—especially young people—how to build, not just how to apply.
Right now, we don’t have scalable, visible pathways for:
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High school students who want to start a business instead of go straight to college
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Tech bootcamp grads who want to launch a SaaS tool instead of join a help desk
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Blue-collar workers who want to own a logistics business or construction firm, not just labor for one
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Creators, coders, builders, and solopreneurs who don’t fit the HR pipeline mold
The irony? Startups, small businesses, and solopreneurs are the majority of job creators in America. According to the Kauffman Foundation, nearly all net new job growth comes from firms less than five years old.
If we keep designing workforce programs around traditional employers only, we’re missing the next wave of builders before they even get started.
Here’s what needs to change:
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Embed entrepreneurship into high school and community college curricula—not as an elective, but as a core option
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Fund founder-first training programs with the same energy we fund welding and coding
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Match startup founders with public apprenticeships, interns, and shadowing programs so students see what building looks like up close
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Create founder fellowships—paid, subsidized paths for young adults to work on building something instead of defaulting into an HR loop
Other cities—like Tulsa, St. Louis, and Indianapolis—are already piloting founder-first workforce strategies. Cincinnati should be doing the same.
Because our future doesn’t just depend on filling job openings.
It depends on creating the next generation of job creators.
5. Take Big Swings
Playing it safe won’t grow GDP. Period.
Cincinnati has been stuck in a cycle of incrementalism—spending millions on studies, ribbon cuttings, and safe bets while other cities are going all-in on the industries that will define the next 20 years.
We need to be willing to bet big on infrastructure, real estate innovation, and next-generation industries like AI, logistics tech, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy—not just to stay competitive, but to become a leader in the heartland.
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Why aren’t we developing the country’s smartest logistics hub using the talent already at DHL and Amazon’s door?
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Why aren’t we retrofitting underused industrial space into founder-run smart manufacturing zones?
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Why hasn’t the city or state seeded a Cincy AI Fund tied to UC’s data science and engineering programs?
Other cities are claiming these opportunities—and the federal funding that comes with them. Just look at what Indianapolis is doing with its hard tech corridor, or what Pittsburgh is doing with autonomous robotics, or how Tulsa launched a $50 million remote worker and startup magnet fund that’s already drawing founders from NYC and SF.
Cincinnati has the talent. It has the buildings. It has the logistics backbone.
What it lacks is the political and institutional willingness to swing.
This is the moment to take a moonshot:
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Build a cross-river AI and advanced logistics district
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Create a deep-tech startup zone at the old Kahn’s factory site
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Back the first clean manufacturing incubator in the Midwest
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Incentivize a $100 million real estate innovation fund to tackle housing, flexible work, and urban revitalization at once
Safe doesn’t scale.
We’ll never compete with billion-dollar ecosystems if we keep betting like it’s 1995.
We’ve Got the Tools—We Need the Will
Cincinnati has the workforce. The capital. The institutions. The proximity.
What we’re missing is urgency and alignment.
We can be more than a midwestern service center. We can be a national innovation hub. But only if we stop thinking like caretakers and start acting like competitors.
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