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Chicago is an emerging market for civic innovation, according to a report released Friday by Washington, D.C., tech hub 1776 and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The report, which surveyed stakeholders in eight cities to discern the strength of their civic entrepreneurship ecosystems, placed Chicago alongside Austin, Texas, and Washington as cities that have emerging startup ecosystems.

The report crowned San Francisco as the country’s top innovation city, putting it alone in the “leading” ecosystem stage. It placed Boston and New York in an “established” stage and New Orleans and Detroit in a “nascent” stage.

Chicago’s “emerging” rating indicates that it is in the early to middle stage of development and shows evidence of some traction, the report said. The authors also deemed leadership, capital and talent in Chicago as “emerging.”

“The real advantage for your city is that you have all of the right ingredients and now it’s time to start making the sauce,” said Margaret Shepard, executive director for communications and strategy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “You have a strong corporate community that’s engaged, you have strong leadership, there’s good capital in the city.”

Chicago ranked ahead of only New Orleans and Washington when it came to the percentage of local entrepreneurs who rated the local network as strong. Some 48 percent of Chicago entrepreneurs surveyed did so, the report said.

The study’s authors assessed the cities’ civic entrepreneurial ecosystems; created a Civic Entrepreneurship Index based on findings from a survey of 230 civic tech entrepreneurs; and gleaned insights from a “listening tour” with individuals who joined roundtable discussions. The study took place over the six months before its release, the report said.

The size and strength of a city’s network correlates to growth in that market, the authors concluded.

“Each city has its own set of issues that they need to deal with and advantages that they have, and Chicago has a unique footprint, being the business hub of the Midwest,” Shepard said. “It’s going to be evaluated differently than a Detroit, which has some serious economic issues and talent issues over the last several years.”

Some 83 percent of San Francisco entrepreneurs surveyed said the city’s local network is strong, the study found. Boston (66 percent), Austin (57 percent), New York (56 percent), Chicago, New Orleans (33 percent) and Washington (22 percent) followed. Detroit didn’t provide enough survey responses to be statistically significant, the report said.

The study’s authors said each local community could do a better job linking entrepreneurs, civic institutions and corporations.

Chicago is the only city that scored the “leading” label in the categories of Institutional & Corporate Support and Community Support Structures, though the authors said entrepreneurs did not perceive “particularly strong support” from those players and structures.

Shepard chalked up that discrepancy to a lack of opportunities for various community members to convene. She said that in some cases the project’s roundtables were the first time that stakeholders had gotten together.

“They need to have a forum in which they can all discuss what’s happening in the city,” she said. “These forums, we saw this across the board, largely just don’t exist.”

Chicago entrepreneurs reported receiving more support from serial entrepreneurs, civic institutions, corporations, venture capitalists and incubators than the survey average. Support from angel investors lagged slightly behind the survey average, and survey results indicated that local entrepreneurs viewed the talent pool more weakly than the survey average. The survey found Chicago’s overall network support 4 percent lower than the average.

Participants in roundtable discussions named Chicago’s corporate community and positioning as “the urban hub of the Midwest region and its connection to the ‘Heartland'” as positives.

Based on survey responses from the eight communities, the authors outlined five areas of opportunity for bolstering civic entrepreneurship in all cities. They include innovative ways to engage citizens; tapping into new business models for civic institutions; and partnerships between startups and established organizations, driven by the those organizations’ fear of disruption.

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The report also identified five major challenges affecting the rise of civic entrepreneurship. Among the challenges are a lack of collaboration among local actors, such as entrepreneurs, civic institutions and corporations; young companies’ struggles to prove credibility when they may lack data; and increased competition as more and more entrepreneurs pitch institutions that must make sense of these offers.

The authors said local ecosystems would benefit by connecting stakeholders — entrepreneurs, civic institutions and corporations. It suggested that civic entrepreneurs should create data sets to help institutions better understand their performance and opportunities for improvement. It also said those institutions should release data to the public — an already much-touted practice in Chicago.