Boston, a playground for innovators
How the American city built a thriving start-up culture
Published:Monday | September 11, 2023 | 12:05 AM
Massachusetts, United States:
The city of Boston in Massachusetts, United States, is a place where, according to co-founder and president of Lab Central, Dr Johannes Fruehauf, “there’s no shortage of good ideas”. But, even more important is the ecosystem in place that supports the development of those ideas.
This is what drives the start-up culture that produces innovations second only to Silicon Valley in California. Thousands of start-ups are located in Boston covering a wide range of industries, including technology, medicine, and blockchain.
“We strongly believe in the power that small entrepreneurial groups have that meet around an idea, and take that idea forward through the different steps of de-risking the initial science and making it a little bit more product-like,” Fruehauf said.
He was speaking to journalists on an international reporting tour exploring innovations in tech policy and navigating AI, organised by the US Department of State’s Foreign Press Centre.
In 2013, with a US$5-million grant from the Massachusetts state government, he started Lab Central, a shared laboratory space designed to support and nurture early-stage biotech and life sciences start-ups to aid that innovation.
“Lab Central is more than just instruments and labs, it’s mostly a community … one of the many aspects that is going on here is mutual education and peer learning; and also expert vertical learning and horizontal learning, and each of these provide an opportunity for people to connect,” he said.
He said the scientists are provided with operational support which allows them to mainly focus on their research, and they are afforded opportunities to network with other stakeholders, such as future investors, collaborators and acquirers.
Six more laboratories have been established since the first one started a decade ago, with a seventh opening soon. Fruehauf said this is a response to the need for more spaces like these and to support the science entrepreneurs at different stages of their innovation.
He shared that there are more than 100 clinical trials going on with drugs created in the labs, and 56 new patents granted last year. Additionally, as “testament to the density of innovation that is happening in Boston”, in 2022 approximately 20 per cent of the US early-stage venture capital financing was captured by Lab Central companies, six companies were acquired and one had an initial public offering, and more than 1,200 jobs were created from the start-ups.
“Innovation is a good thing for everyone because it drives economic development,” he declared.
The space can accommodate 65-70 start-ups and, although the majority are from the state of Massachusetts, it is also open to international applicants. It is a model that Freuhauf is hopeful other countries, including developing economies, will adopt.
REAPING BENEFITS
Fifteen years ago, Chris Ilsley, president and CEO of InnoVenture Labs, had a similar idea of providing mentorship and training to start-up companies, and he has been reaping dividends. More than 85 companies have been impacted since, and more than US$1.1 billion in investments has been generated.
He said companies boast a success rate of 89 per cent, and more than 400 patents have been approved.
“This building alone, pre-pandemic, there was more VC (venture capital) in here than in Europe in total, and there was more venture capital in this square mile than anywhere else in the world,” he stated. “Boston is buzzing with science and technology; the only thing we don’t do much of… we don’t do a lot of social media stuff, that is more of a west coast [thing]. We do hard tech, tough tech.”
The facility hosts companies researching innovations in life science and clean technology, and he said artificial intelligence (AI) has been a key component in how they are adding value to their innovations.
“We are now seeing companies that we deal with … are using data analytics or AI as an add-on for a new service they can provide,” he said.
Of note, he said Boston is home to most of the country’s big pharmaceutical companies, as well as major corporations positioning satellite companies in the city to take advantage of the rich pool of graduates and researchers coming out of Boston’s more than 60 universities.
At software company Autodesk, which provides AI-driven tools to aid in architecture, engineering and construction, its vice-president of government affairs and public policy, Andrew Friendly, extols the collaboration between academia and industry as a driver of Boston’s fast innovation pace.
In addition to the availability of investors and facilities, he said the foresight of the state’s government is also key in nurturing the start-up culture.
“There is a real push by the local government here in Massachusetts to ensure that the innovation community continues to flourish; in training, in ensuring that there are the right incentives to keep companies here in Boston,” he said.
Like Fruehauf and Ilsley, Friendly said Autodesk also provides facilities to support tech entrepreneurs called training centres.
The centres are in Boston, San Francisco, Toronto in Canada, and Birmingham in England.
“These technology centres are places where we could bring our customers and researchers to work side by side with us, to understand some of the challenges that they might face in pushing the envelope in innovation, on new ways of building or designing things. And it helps to inform our software developers about where the future of design and construction and manufacturing is going,” he said.