On April 3rd, the Association for a Better New York, partnered with Citigroup, Google, and New York Tech Meetup, released a very important report written by HR & A Advisors: The New York City Tech Ecosystem.

The report's analysis is much wider and more nuanced than previous such research on NYC's tech sector, focusing on the "ecosystem," i.e., technology's footprint across all of the city's industries, not simply the self-identified "tech" companies.

For instance, finance, not included in earlier studies, accounts for a substantial number of tech jobs as many banks create their own software. NYC's tech industry is second only to that of Silicon Valley within the USA, dwarfing that of San Francisco, Boston and other cities, accounts for 12.6% of the Big Apple's jobs, and is growing fast.

I encourage you to study the report closely as a trove of data and a map for the road ahead. Among other things, The New York City Tech Ecosystem acknowledges that the tech boom is still primarily Manhattan-centric (though the other boroughs are staging important initiatives of their own) and that men are disproportionately represented thus far (the report has little to say about racial/ethnic representation).

The report is a valuable addition to the research on urban and industry clusters, such as Dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Information AnnaLee Saxenian's pioneering 1994 study Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, the work of Michael Porter and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy & Competitiveness and that of Bruce Katz and his teammates at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Two suggestions for a future edition of this groundbreaking effort: an added focus on NYC's international competition (comparing us not only to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but to Seoul, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, London, etc.) and a closer look at the arts & design sectors as tech-driven and tech drivers.

I suspect the tech footprint is even bigger than the report finds, were the myriad design, arts and architecture businesses included more fully. Furniture designers in Brooklyn using hacking and creating CAD-CAM tools, lighting designers likewise on Broadway, architects pushing for ever more powerful rendering software, and so on...

Delving into the art & design spaces would build on the work of Richard Florida on "the creative class" as crucial for urban prosperity and on several recent reports:

The National Governors Association's May 2012 report New Engines Of Growth: Five Roles For Arts, Culture & Design, The Center for An Urban Future's June 2011 report Growth By Design and the Alliance for the Arts 2007 study Arts As An Industry: Their Economic Impact on New York City and New York State

(Disclosure: Individuals employed by/affiliated with Citi and with NY Tech Meetup sit in their private capacities on the MOUSE Board, and Google is a partner to MOUSE; I have not discussed this post with them, which reflects my personal views.)

Daniel Rabuzzi is the Executive Director of Mouse.