In response to Bruce Nussbaum's post the other day over at BusinessWeek, asking if New York was becoming the new hub of design and innovation, Ross Popoff-Walker has a much more articulate and better reasoned reply to Nussbaum than our own. In it, he argues that yes, there might be lots of firms moving to NY or opening satelitte offices, but it's important to distinguish between the different types of design and innovation (i.e. it isn't just advertising) and how essentially academic areas are, and how those aren't moving anywhere anytime soon. Here's a bit:

It's no secret recipe that innovation comes from areas with strong academic environments -- learning hubs like Boston (MIT's Media Lab, Harvard), Pittsburgh (Carneige Mellon U and the Entertainment Technology Center), or Chicago (Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology).

In fact, Pittsburgh is a great case study -- Google opened up an office there because of the rich talent coming from Carnegie Mellon.

So yes, something is brewing in NYC -- the ad/marketing industry is undergoing a transformational shift to a design-focus -- and NYC has always been a hub for advertising.