Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Five Great Ideas from Today's IT Collaborative Event


There was a whole lot of tweeting going on this morning at the Massachusetts IT Collaborative event at Microsoft's NERD Center in Kendall Square... and the energy level at the event was really high.

One thing that was kind of depressing to me was listening to people like Steven Vinter of Google, Andy Ory of Acme Packet, and Emily Green of the Yankee Group try to sum up what had been discussed over a few hours in just five minutes when Gov. Patrick showed up to "listen." Vinter also showed an egregiously bad slide that tried to, I think, illustrate all the interconnects between various IT clusters in Massachusetts -- but it was one of those slides with an encyclopedia's worth of text on it, bubbles connected to bubbles, arrows everywhere. Rube Goldberg would have been proud, and I suspect it sent the message that the IT industry isn't so sharp when it comes to simplicity or clarity of message.

But there were lots of great ideas in circulation. Here are five that really resonated with me, and a quote I liked:

1. Michael Greeley of Flybridge Capital suggested that CEOs of larger, more successful companies ought to have "office hours" for younger, up-and-coming CEOs, much like college profs do. That could be a nice, low-commitment way of mentoring ... perhaps letting them commit one or two hours a month when they wouldn't have to leave their building. Many people at today's event focused on the issue of mentorship as a key to cultivating a new crop of big, important, sustainable companies here.

2. We need to make federal visa policy an important issue that everyone here in Massachusetts is engaged with. Part of what we do in the state is to make young people smarter. Why do we then allow them to be shipped back home, especially if they'd rather be working (or starting great companies) here? Akamai CEO Paul Sagan paraphrased Thomas Friedman, who has suggested that we staple a green card to every advanced degree we give out in the US.

3. Sagan also mentioned that you can walk or drive through Kendall Square and never know it is one of our region's hubs of innovation. (Perhaps even a denser concentration of smart people, research labs, and cool companies than anywhere in Silicon Valley.) But there are no signs to let you know what's there. If you drive down Highway 101 in California, in contrast, you see all kinds of evidence of the tech economy: Oracle, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, etc. The photo above is the blank sign at the front door to Google's Cambridge office, which perhaps 10,000 people pass by every day.

4. Connecting with students is a big challenge. Let's say you run a trade group and you want to make your annual conference open to students... or you want to organize an open house at your company to attract great students for a summer internship. There's no easy way to communicate with the student bodies of the hundreds of great schools around Massachusetts. I wonder how tough it would be to create a wiki that lists the contacts at every school's career office, and perhaps the e-mail addresses of the students who run the entrepreneurship/tech/business club on campus, and a few profs interested in helping be liaisons to industry. This wiki might also list tech companies willing to send speakers onto campuses for classes or club meetings, along with the relevant contact.

5. Tod Loofbourrow, founder of Authoria, had a great take during the session on communication... something that came up in last month's brainstorming session on how we can better communicate the innovative stuff that happens in our corner of the world. He said that pioneering work is being done here on healthcare IT, and making the healthcare more efficient, and that we should commit to saving the U.S. X number of dollars and X number of lives with our innovations. That got us all talking about how Massachusetts is focused not on tech-for-the-sake-of-tech, but technology that solves real problems... whether in healthcare, energy, business, or other spheres. That strikes me as really good positioning.

Finally, I liked Andy Ory's comment that we're still haunted by the ghost of Rout 128 past...and the ghost of California present...but what we really should be focused on is the ghost of Massachusetts' future.

What'd you hear that you liked? Did you post about the event? Feel free to add something in the comments...

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Gov. Patrick on Non-Compete Agreements in Massachusetts


I had the chance to chat with Governor Deval Patrick for a few minutes today at Microsoft's NERD Center, toward the end of the Innovate MassTech meeting (aka the IT Collaborative Study Group Meeting.) So I asked him about non-competes.

Paul Sagan, the CEO of Akamai, had just said on stage that he is in favor of keeping non-compete agreements legal and enforceable in Massachusetts, and that he'd seen no data that says that non-competes have any effect on making us less competitive. (The best data I've seen comes from this excellent paper written by three folks at Harvard Business School.) Another CEO told me he liked the fact that employees were more loyal (or less mobile) than in California, so you didn't have to worry about constant turnover here.

Yet at the event, I also spoke with a number of people who'd either been prevented from hiring someone they wanted to hire because of Massachusetts' stance on non-competes, or who knew first-hand of someone who'd been prevented from moving from one company to another.

I asked Gov. Patrick whether the non-compete issue had shown up on his radar screen, and he said it had -- he'd heard about it here in Massachusetts and on a recent trip to California. "I don't have a stake in the status quo," he said. He'd heard arguments from individuals who have been prevented from taking jobs because of non-competes, and also from executives who feel that keeping employees from jumping to other firms in their industry helps them stay competitive. "There's not a consensus view" of whether they're a positive or negative thing in Massachusetts, he said. I suggested that larger companies would love for non-competes continue to continue to be enforceable, while many small start-ups would like to get rid of them -- and that the bigger companies have more political throw weight. The governor didn't agree that things break down so neatly between big and small.

He seemed like he's still in listening mode, willing to be persuaded: "If there's consensus in the industry [as to whether they're a good or bad thing], I'm happy to support that."

And then he went off to be pounced upon by the rest of the media mob... (see pic above)

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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

A Gloomy Outlook at Mass Biotech Council's Annual Meeting

Kind of a depressing way to start the day…

The Mass Biotech Council’s Annual Meeting began with an overview of the group’s newly-issued strategic report, which observes that biotech in the Bay State is likely to undergo a serious shake-out in 2009. According to analysis by Deloitte and L.E.K. Consulting, half of all public biotech companies in the state could run out of cash before the end of this year, and one-third to one-half of all private companies will be out trying to raise money in 2009.

By the end of the day, things hadn’t gotten much sunnier. A panel on the economic outlook for the next year seemed to conclude that things will get worse, not better, for most life sciences companies over the coming year.

“If you have cash flow, are close to cash flow, or are cash flow positive,” the outlook isn’t so terrible, said Jonathan Fleming, managing general partner at Oxford Bioscience Partners. What’s happening right now, Fleming said, is kind of like a forest fire. A lot of things will burn, but that creates opportunities for new breakthroughs, he said.

MIT Sloan School economist Ernie Berndt suggested that companies working on diagnostics and vaccines will likely feel more wind at their backs than others. But Berndt noted that while disease foundations (like the Gates Foundation or the Michael J. Fox Foundation) have been ardent supporters of drug development over the past few years, that funding seems to be slowing in the current economic climate.

There was a smidgen of good news from the panelists. Berndt said that the pathway to bringing follow-on biologics to market “is going to be much more difficult than predicted.” Fleming said Africa is an interesting market for vaccine development, mainly because the US government has been so supportive with its financial backing. Berndt said that as big pharmaceutical companies are increasingly dedicating their resources to developing blockbuster drugs, opportunities exist for small companies to come up with “niche-busters” for more focused groups of patients.

“You guys are painting a rosier picture of today, and a more negative picture of a year from now,” said moderator Bob Buderi. “The President has been saying the opposite.”

Things could be worse, quipped Frank Hatheway, Nasdaq’s chief economist: at least you’re not in real estate, or a community banker in Michigan. Not sure that made people feel much better…

The day wrapped up with a quick visit from Governor Deval Patrick, who tried to jawbone the despondent agglomeration into hiring union contruction workers for any expansion projects they might be planning. “One out of every five people claiming unemployment benefits are from the building trades,” the governor said. They see a billion dollars of public funding going into the life sciences field, and yet “they don’t feel they get a fair shot at jobs on your projects,” he said. “I ask you as a partner, a friend, and your governor, to give union workers a fair chance to compete.”

Gov. Patrick ended with what I thought was a nice phrase: “Innovation is our edge” in Massachusetts. Sectors like biotech, cleantech, health care, high tech, and smart manufacturing “will be our path out of this recession and into a strong and secure economic future.”

That, at least, offered an upbeat segue into the cocktail hour.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Dear Deval and Greg: You Are Missing the Point on Branding

Good to see Rob Weisman's piece in today's Globe about rebranding the tech sector in Massachusetts.

As readers of this blog know, this is a campaign that I have been trying to nudge forward for a few months. (A blog-based brainstorming session happened here in December 2008, and I wrote a column in the Globe on the topic later that month.)

But our fearless elected leaders, especially Greg Bialecki and Deval Patrick, are missing two very important points:

- Trying to brand the tech sector, and also trying to brand the life sciences sector, and oh yeah, we also have financial services, and education, and cleantech, is a pointless exercise. We're about innovation across all sectors... we are about coming up with new ideas that change the world, no matter what industry they're applied to, or whether they involve software, hardware, genomic data, engineered molecules, or medical devices.

- This ought not to be a Massachusetts solo project. We are part of a regional cluster that is called New England, and innovative stuff is happening from Burlington to Portland, from Providence to Northampton... (and even in Hartford!) If you believe that we're competing in a global economy, let's leverage everything we've got in the region.

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Monday, February 9, 2009

Tomorrow at the State House: Event on Education, Entrepreneurship & Mentoring

MassEntrepreneurship 2009, taking place Feb 10th at the State House in Boston, focuses on how universities can better support entrepreneurship -- a really important topic. After the requisite intro from the Governor, there are two panels: one on running mentorship programs that connect students with experienced businessfolk, and another on supporting young entrepreneurs. The event is free, but you need to register here.

And while we're on the topic of supporting young entrepreneurs, Jeffrey Bussgang of Flybridge Capital sends an update about the Stay in MA program, which helps cover the cost when students attend industry networking events and conferences. Bussgang writes:

    ...[I]n the first month of the program, we have granted over a dozen student scholarships for students from Babson, BU, MIT, Harvard, UMass Boston and even one high school. We are actively marketing the program on campuses throughout the state and have developed partnerships with nearly every local business association. The breadth of the associations supporting it are awesome – check it out at www.stayinma.com. The website attracts over 1000 visitors per month.

    The feedback has been terrific. ...The Governor has been super-supportive as well – he’s asked for direct updates from us and enlisted his Secretary of Economic Development to assist in promoting.


Lots of organizations are involved, and are doing a better job of promoting Stay in MA on their Web sites to let students know about the program.... the only notable non-participants are the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Massachusetts Biotech Council.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Patrick and Bialecki Wake Up to the Need to Rebrand Mass.

I'm glad that Gov. Patrick and Greg Bialecki, the new secretary for housing and economic development, have been talking about the need to rebrand Massachusetts as part of their west coast swing this week.

This is a great step forward.... but I'd like to see a pan-New England branding effort get started, rather than pitching each state as an island unto itself.

Or am I being blind to the way state politics always work?

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Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Gov. Patrick: Let's Crack the Energy Crisis

Gov. Deval Patrick writes about the state's new energy law in today's Globe:

    Our vision capitalizes on the Commonwealth's natural advantages in technology and entrepreneurship to combat rising energy costs and satisfy the need for new, clean, affordable ways to meet energy needs - creating a whole new industry along the way.


Later, he mentions a few companies by name:

    ...A123 Systems in Watertown, which is developing batteries for plug-in hybrid cars to enable them to get up to 150 miles per gallon; Evergreen Solar, which is set to open a new solar-panel manufacturing facility in Devens, encouraged in part by the state's new rebate program for solar electricity installations, Commonwealth Solar; Mascoma in Cambridge and Sun Ethanol in Amherst, two leaders in cellulosic biofuel, the non-petroleum, non-food-based fuel of the future, which will get a boost from a gas-tax exemption now pending in the Legislature, the first of its kind in the country; and GreatPoint Energy, a Cambridge firm now demonstrating its innovative technology for turning coal and biomass into clean-burning natural gas at the Brayton Point power plant in Somerset.

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Monday, June 16, 2008

Patrick's Biotech Bill: The Decade of Truth

Todd Wallack has a great piece in this morning's Globe about the new $1 billion biotech stimulus initiative, which becomes law today.

Wallack writes:

    The bill includes $250 million in tax incentives for companies, $250 million in grants, and $500 million for infrastructure, much of which is earmarked for the state university system. Several local biotech companies, including Shire PLC, Genzyme Corp., Wyeth, and Organogenesis Inc., stand to directly benefit from the legislation.

    [Gov. Deval] Patrick said the legislation gives him a powerful platform to sell Massachusetts to biotech leaders - encouraging more companies to expand or set up shop here.

    "We've got an awful lot to offer," Patrick said in an interview. "We are all about selling it."


Today, biotech is a pretty small (but influential) industry in Massachusetts -- about one percent of the state's workforce. Whether this billion bucks can be invested intelligently is the question that everyone in the industry was asking this past weekend at Convergence. Not everyone's optimistic. And we're not likely to know whether this money has really moved the needle for a decade.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Inside Google's Cambridge, MA Offices

Google held an open house this morning at their three-month old Kendall Square offices (they moved to 5 Cambridge Center from the Cambridge Innovation Center earlier this year.) There wasn't much news... but it was a chance to meet some of the Googlers, watch Governor Deval Patrick play ping pong with Stephen Vinter, the Cambridge site director, and see demos of projects the Cambridge outpost has contributed to, like the Android mobile operating system.

Some data points about what's happening at the Cambridge office, followed by a video interview with Vinter, who talked about how Google hires for this office.

    - Cambridge has 175 employees, split roughly evenly between ad sales and engineering.


    - Google opened a Boston sales office in 2002; engineering began here in 2005.


    - Among the projects Cambridge Googlers contribute to are YouTube, Blogger, Friend Connect/Open Social, book search, Android, infrastructure, Web crawl, and networking -- which seems like a pretty broad range.


    - I asked Vinter whether any new projects were indigenous to Cambridge... that is, they'd sprang out of the local office, rather than been delegated by someone at the Googleplex in Mountain View. He said that Friend Connect, a toolbox for easily adding social networking to Web sites, is an example of one. (It was overseen by Norris Boyd, who was demoing it today in Cambridge.)


    - Neither Larry Page or Sergey Brin, Google's founders, have visited the Cambridge office, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt has.


In my video chat with Vinter, I asked him about Google's hiring and interview process, and how the culture in Cambridge differs from Mountain View.




And here's some more coverage of today's open house: New England Cable News ... Mass High Tech ... Cambridge Chronicle ... BostonGlobe

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Monday, April 7, 2008

A Sunny Day in Massachusetts

This expansion of Evergreen Solar's manufacturing facility in Harvard, Mass., doubling its size and adding 350 jobs, is really good news. From Sacha Pfeiffer's story:

    For Evergreen, a public company founded in 1994, the state's commitment to solar power played a key role in its decision to expand in Massachusetts, Feldt said.

    Before [Gov. Deval] Patrick took office, Evergreen was considering building its first US manufacturing facility in a state such as Oregon or New Mexico that offers hefty incentives to clean energy companies, Feldt said. But during his gubernatorial campaign, Patrick visited Evergreen's Marlborough headquarters to try to persuade it to construct its plant in Massachusetts, according to Feldt.

    Ultimately, the $44 million financing package dangled by Massachusetts - including $23 million in grants and $17.5 million in low-interest loans - was not the most generous Evergreen was offered. But "what really tipped the scales was the Patrick administration's focus on alternative energy," Feldt said.

    "Deval said he was going to create an environment that is solar-friendly, and that was really important to us, and he's really done that," Feldt added. "So while the financial incentive was attractive but not the best, it was the genuine interest - and then the follow-through - in making solar important in Massachusetts that had us stay here."


This is a solid step in making Massachusetts a magnet for cleantech innovation.

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Thursday, August 30, 2007

The Coughlin Incident: New Mass Biotech Chief Off to a Rocky Start

The new head of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, Robert Coughlin, is already in some pretty warm water, facing an ethics complaint filed by Republicans because he may not have notified the governor soon enough that he was talking to the Council about taking the gig.

Coughlin apparently met with the Mass Biotech Council's search committee on June 11th, according to the Globe, but didn't disclose to Gov. Patrick that he was in discussions until July 24th, when he recused himself from overseeing life sciences issues. The Council announced his appointment, somewhat abruptly, on August 13th, four days after the other candidate for the job, State Senator Jack Hart, dropped out of contention. Coughlin was on vacation in the wilds of Colorado and couldn't give the Globe an interview on the day of his announcement -- a strange stumble during what you'd expect would be a well-planned PR event.

Here are the stories:

In that last piece, columnist Joan Vennochi writes:

    ...All it would have taken was for Coughlin to disclose his discussions at the outset. Under state law, that disclosure is supposed to trigger a review that would either reassign his state duties to another employee, or determine that reassignment wasn't necessary.
    Now, the public has the right to wonder if Coughlin's job talks influenced his policy negotiations on the state's behalf.
    And the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council has the right to wonder how much the controversy influences their access to the Patrick administration.

Coughlin's first day on the job is the Tuesday after Labor Day.

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