Small towns cannot be tech hubs, because that's not even what a 'hub' is. It would be the end node, or an outlier constantly. I'm from a small town but we have one huge industry which employs around 80% of the local community. The rest of the folks are in construction, service industries, schools, etc. No amount of effort would turn that region into a tech or innovation hub without it also turning it into a city.
Instead of trying to shore up the weaknesses of rural communities how can they play to their strengths? A small community and lifestyle has lots of benefits over living in the city but you have to value both working in tech (remotely) _and_ what a small community has to offer.
The biggest problem for small and medium communities is brain drain. It's a vicious death spiral because the smart and ambitious kids basically have to move away to large cities to get quality jobs.
The only solution I can think of is incentivizing remote work so people don't have to be concentrated in cities. You might not even have to incentivize it because it's a tremendous advantage as a tech company to be able to recruit from any where in the country where lots of talented people don't want to move for family reasons or don't want to live in a city
You're absolutely right. Incentivizing remote work could definitely help!
With that said, it may be worth considering that there is some subtlety here. It's surprisingly difficult to integrate remote workers into a company that has and uses offices. A lot of communication is lost when people aren't regularly sharing the same physical spaces, and cultural practices and technologies to date are mostly limited to mitigating this loss slightly. There's a drop in productivity, and it appears to be (in general, at scale, individuals can and do vary wildly) inevitable. Building a small company entirely from exceptional individuals is workable, but as a model it can't scale.
Right now the major incentive is that remote workers can be paid the local-to-them pay rate. This is a problem, as it rarely matches the model of remote work that smaller towns and would-be remote workers have in mind.
There's also some major wins that individuals gain by congregating in urban areas with their industry. It's harder to replace these with remote work, as much of it depends on concentration enabling serendipity.
Again, you're completely right. Remote work could definitely help! There might be some subtleties worth considering is all.
The only incentivizing needed is to provide fiber to the home so everyone has ample connectivity to compete on a level playing field, and then businesses will figure out which mix of remote and in office employees works for them and allows them to best position themselves in the market.
Fiber to the home may be desirable but it's overrated. I've had tech co-workers who managed with satellite because that was their only option to live on a rural property they wanted.
You can watch whether this is working in real time: just watch NZ which has rolled out fiber to the home: NZ could be looked at as a rural area.
From what I have seen, for most people it means Netflix, and it has had very little impact upon NZ software development (certainly not a billion dollars worth).
Truely rural areas don't get fibre (too expensive per household) and often have no ADSL either (more than 5km from exchange).
Instead of trying to shore up the weaknesses of rural communities how can they play to their strengths? A small community and lifestyle has lots of benefits over living in the city but you have to value both working in tech (remotely) _and_ what a small community has to offer.