KNOXVILLE, Tennessee
Population: 183,270
Unemployment: 5.9 percent
Fortune 500 Companies: 0
Home to the 1982 World’s Fair—where touch screens and Cherry Coca-Cola debuted—Knoxville rates high on a lot of best lists—value, entrepreneurial spirit, best for business and career. That’s in part due to a diversity of talent and thinking brought to town by the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an internationally recognized Department of Energy lab home to several of the world’s largest supercomputers.