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Print Edition StoriesFriday, May 22, 2009
How We See It
More than a month of celebrating innovation
By Mass High Tech staff
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While the onset of the summer months is usually the beginning of the what once was considered the tech-business doldrums, this June will see an explosion of technology-related events in New England — so much so that an ad hoc group of individuals and organizations have banded together to brand June as “New England Innovation Month.”
The effort is, in some ways, a response to perceptions characterized most recently by such news as storied venture capital firm Greylock Partners moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley. This impression — that New England lacks some necessary ingredient to successful entrepreneurship, and that this region can’t compete with Silicon Valley — is overblown and unrelenting. After all, as we report on Page 1, Cisco has joined the ranks of several other global tech giants focusing special attention on New England by establishing R&D and business development groups here. If the tech giants from outside New England want our innovative ideas that badly, they must recognize that this is where the best ones come from.
But perceptions persist, and a month’s worth of networking events are unlikely to eliminate them right away. In the meantime, celebrating what New Englanders do best — inventing what’s next — is what New England Innovation Month is all about. Prompted by a team of tech-focused entities gathered by tech journalist and blogger Scott Kirsner, the effort was simply to let people know what events are going on in June, and to get as many entrepreneurs — and, perhaps more importantly, your innovative ideas — to as many different events as possible. It’s an effort to create a tech gestalt that will, in the words of the Innovation Month’s new website, take New England’s already outstanding creative, entrepreneurial economy and crank it “up to 11.”
The website was developed by Mass High Tech columnist Richard Banfield’s company, Fresh Tilled Soil, and can be found at www.neinnovation.com. You’ll see several events that MHT is sponsoring, including the Innovation Series from the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Mass Life Sciences Innovation Day and Mass Innovation Night. We strongly encourage you, our readers, to attend as many of these events as possible. The competitor in you demands it.
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