Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States, located in the state of Illinois on the shores of Lake Michigan. Founded by Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a Haitian born of a slave mother and a French sailor, in the 1780s, Chicago is today a metropolis of nearly 3 million inhabitants, the economic capital of the American Midwest. The city is a major economic and cultural center, known for its architecture, art scene, gastronomy and history. The city is famous for its architecture, with iconic buildings such as the Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center and Cloud Gate, nicknamed “The Bean”, and its urban spaces such as the Chicago Riverwalk, Grant Park and Navy Pier. In terms of infrastructure, Chicago boasts O’Hare International Airport (ORD), one of the busiest in the world, and is a major rail and shipping hub, thanks to its strategic location on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The city is also a mecca for culture and the arts, with world-renowned museums such as the Chicago Art Institute and the Field Museum of Natural History.

Surrounding the state of Illinois, the Midwest and Great Lakes region is traditionally focused on agriculture, with companies such as Cargill and ADM making a major contribution to the development and funding of research in the agri-food sector. With some forty universities, and the presence of FermiLab and Argonne National Laboratory, research has a prominent place in the Chicago metropolis.

With a 2020 metropolitan GDP of $700B, Chicago is the third-largest economic area in the United States, behind New York and Los Angeles. The city is home to the headquarters of 35 Fortune 500 companies, including Boeing, United, AbbVie and John Deere, as well as numerous food industry giants such as Kraft Heinz, McDonald’s and Conagra Brands. It also has a strong presence in the financial, technology and healthcare sectors.

Traditionally focused on agriculture, which generates $9.4B a year in the region, the Midwest economy has gradually diversified. Research and development efforts have focused on fields as varied as steelmaking, metallurgy, automotive, agricultural and industrial equipment, electronics, healthcare, life sciences, telecommunications and information technology, energy storage and cyber-infrastructure. Several pharmaceutical companies have chosen to set up in Chicago, including Abbott Laboratories, Astellas, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, Hospira and AbbVie. The entrepreneurial ecosystem that has grown up around this industrial environment is now valued at $49B.

Chicago is home to many prestigious universities, including the University of Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology and Northwestern University. Other renowned universities, such as the  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are located in the Chicago metropolitan area. These universities provide an important talent pool for startups, the research world and major corporations: for example, University of Chicago has nearly 18,000 students, University of Illinois Chicago nearly 35,000 students and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign nearly 45,000 students. Like the best American universities, they place great emphasis on the interaction between scientific research and the commercialization of disruptive technologies. For example, the University of Chicago currently counts seven Nobel Prize laureates among its professors, and capitalizes on its Chicago Booth business school to foster the emergence of technology startups. To this end, the university network can also count on a panoply of incubation and acceleration programs such as: University Technology Park (UTP), an incubator managed by the Illinois Institute of Technology; Polsky Center, attached to the University of Chicago, which has supported several success stories such as CancerIQ; Technology Innovation Lab (TiLab), belonging to the University of Illinois at Chicago, and strategically located in the Illinois Medical District. A quantum startup accelerator, Duality, was also recently created on the University of Chicago site, complementing an already well-structured quantum ecosystem.

Chicago also boasts a number of leading-edge national laboratories, including Argonne National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center run by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which welcomes some 8,000 scientists every year, and Fermilab, a physics research center boasting one of the largest particle accelerators in the United States.

Chicago’s startup ecosystem has been growing for several years now. The year 2021 was marked by the breakthrough of 12 new unicorns in Chicago – bringing their total number to 20 – as well as by fundraising of over 7 Md$ for all startups in the ecosystem. The entrepreneurial culture is supported by local incubators such as 1871, Chicago whose startups have raised over $1.5B, or mHub, specialized in hardware startups, whose startups have raised over $1B.

Public-private organizations are also involved in the city’s economic development. One of them, World Business Chicago, works to foster economic growth, create jobs and promote Chicago as a leading global city; at the state level, Intersect Illinois is the agency in charge of economic development and assisting entrepreneurs wishing to set up in Illinois.