Wednesday, March 16, 2011

How I See It

MassTLC 2020 challenge: Create 100,000 "new tech" jobs!

By Mohamad Ali, MassTLC Chairman; Tom Hopcroft, MassTLC president and CEO

Jobs. They drive our economy. They enable us to put food on the table, heat our homes and send our kids to college. But today, we have more people out of work than at any time since 1993. And when those lost jobs come back, they will be different; the skills we have today will not be right for the new jobs. So what can our community do to catalyze job creation and ensure we have the skills to fill these jobs?

At the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), we have some thoughts we would like to share with you through 12 articles throughout the coming year. It’s an effort to galvanize the Massachusetts IT sector around a common mission: the creation of 100,000 new IT jobs, plus an additional 163,000 related non-IT jobs, over the next 10 years. This would generate over $16 billion of income for Massachusetts’ residents.

Let’s start with the math. Today, the Massachusetts IT sector employs 178,000 people, making it second only to health-care delivery. A growth rate of 5 percent per year for 10 years gets us another 100,000 jobs. The IT sector in developed countries is expected to grow at low single digits, while IT in emerging countries (e.g., China) is expected to grow at high single digits to low double digits. How can we grow enough to generate these jobs?

We need to employ the tried and true strategy that companies like Akamai, Avaya, iRobot and our other 400 MassTLC member companies have employed for years — disproportionately and disruptively innovate in markets that are fast growing and large enough to offset our slow growth markets. Fortunately, we have a wealth of opportunities to do this in Massachusetts. Some of our emerging “new tech” markets far exceed this 5 percent growth target. For example, mobile applications are growing at 38 percent, cloud based analytics at 22 percent and video at 17 percent. So what can we do to increase the probability of these “new tech” companies succeeding and generating jobs?

At MassTLC, we have developed a “Framework of Action” to catalyze this job growth. The framework lays out 12 issues in three categories — people, finance and infrastructure. People is about the right talent — talent aligned with our growth markets — and includes growing our own, retaining our graduates, retraining our professionals, importing from outside, and mentorship. Finance is about leveraging existing capital at the right stages and connecting customers to our “new tech” companies. And infrastructure is about bringing people together physically and virtually (increasing the “bump factor”), as well as improving our state’s regulatory infrastructure (e.g., contractor laws).

The “bump factor” is particularly important. Let’s assume that we have five people with the combined set of skills required to create and commercialize an amazing new innovation — the next Guitar Hero or the next Roomba. If these five people never meet, the innovation never happens, and the jobs are never created.
Because we have failed to even deliver decent public transportation to our tech hubs outside of Cambridge, over-reliance on expensive physical infrastructure needs to be tempered. We need to come up with new ways, not polished old ideas, to increase this “bump factor.” In an article later this year, we will introduce new approaches to transportation using what we do best in the IT sector: technology.

Over the next 12 months, we will lay out these 12 framework issues and challenges for which you, our brilliant industry, academic and state leaders, can develop near-term solutions in an effort to catalyze innovation, create new jobs and improve the lives of the residents of Massachusetts and beyond. Our job as leaders and participants of the information technology sector is to create the conditions to spark that innovation.


Mohamad Ali, Mass Technology Leadership Council Chairman and senior vice president of of corporate development and strategy at Avaya Inc., and Tom Hopcroft, MassTLC president and CEO. This article is part one of a 12-part series about the "MassTLC 2020 Challenge" to grow the tech sector by 100,000 jobs over the coming decade. Learn more at http://www.masstlc.org/challenge.