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MHT's Galen Moore: Nerds and geeks flock to Boston conventions
UMass Boston launches Entrepreneurship Center
At what point do you take the long view? When do you build on a belief that a new idea will lead to growth? On the flip side, how do you do sanity checks on unrealistic dreams?
We look at economic development in this issue. The timing is interesting because businesses and development agencies are digging out from the recession. The past two years haven’t been prime time for long-term planning.
More decades ago than I care to remember, I was reporting in Cambridge, and the hot issue was DNA research proposed for Harvard and MIT. The mayor at the time was Al Vellucci, and he wanted the city to impose restrictions on the labs. Federal safety guidelines were somewhat complete and largely untested, so Vellucci pressed the universities for disclosure of their plans and for the acceptance of his own guidelines. And Al wasn’t above airing the specter of deformed beasts and diseases rising from the sewers — hey, he was a politician.
Vellucci was branded an obstructionist, while Harvard and MIT were painted as elitists. In the end, things settled in some middle ground. The universities got their research, but they had more eyes on them.
By coincidence, Cambridge was launching its own initiatives at about the same time — redevelopment of the Kendall Square area. Those plans definitely took the long view. Vellucci’s politicking and the universities’ rush to build labs were really just short-term moves, measured in months, yet they did balance out.
Picture that neighborhood today without the hundreds of biotechs spawned there. Without knowing it, they had laid the groundwork for what Kendall was to become. It was the long view versus short-term thinking, and (at least in this case) a long-term vision was realized.
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