How can Massachusetts seize the opportunity to become the premier technology hub?
Study findings: Massachusetts IT industry sector is a powerful economic engine for the Commonwealth, pumping $65 billion into the Massachusetts economy in 2008

Governor Deval Patrick

WATERTOWN – The December 7 gathering at “Fenway Park West,” as the auditorium space at Communispace is dubbed (replete with its model Red Sox scoreboard), brought together more than 150 thought leaders in Massachusetts to discuss findings from a new study by the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, The IT Industry: Hub of the Massachusetts Technology Economy.

“In 2009, we hired 40 more employees,” Hessan said. “We employ 250 people, with more than 100 people in their 20s.”

View more photos from the event here.

Housing and Economic Development Secretary Gregory Bialecki, who served as moderator of a roundtable discussion at the gathering, reinforced the message on the state’s innovation agenda and jobs. “Gov. Patrick has given me three directives: ‘Jobs, jobs and more jobs.’”

The study’s findings hammered home the fact that Massachusetts’ technology hub is a powerful – and growing – economic engine:

Chair of the Department of Public Policy at the UMassDartmouth Michael Goodman Background: Verizon Region President of New England Donna Cupelo, UMass President Jack Wilson, and Governor Patrick

Michael Goodman, the current chair of the Department of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and who directed the Donahue Institute study, noted that it was very important to understand who your competitors were. In his presentation of findings he drew attention to survey results in the study, in which IT industry executives compared Massachusetts and California as a business location, with some surprising results. The executives rated Massachusetts as one of the best regions in the world for opportunities for innovation and growth, ranking high in categories including: access to world class research partners, presence of strong school systems, ease of commuting, access to cultural amenities and cost of housing.

“Massachusetts versus California,” Goodman said, invoking an analogy befitting the location in ‘Fenway Park West,’ “is very much like the Red Sox versus the Yankees. They may have a bigger budget and more resources, but we’ve beaten the Yankees before, and we’ll beat them again.” He continued: “Today, California is a basket case. Compared to Massachusetts, it highlights the stability and extraordinary innovative technology hub the Commonwealth represents.”

At the same time, Goodman cautioned folks to pay attention to some negative findings in the survey: High business costs – in both regulations, taxes and fees – are a deterrent; and more attention is needed to promote a collaborative culture between industries and sectors, instead of silos.

GOV. DEVAL PATRICK was very engaged at the gathering. He presented the key findings, and then stayed to answer questions and listen to the dialogue, even extending his time there when his scheduler noted that it was time to go. “Another 10 minutes,” Gov. Patrick responded.

Gianfranco Zaccai, the president and chief design officer of Continuum, the Massachusetts-based global design firm, asked Gov. Patrick why Massachusetts didn’t label its products, “Designed in Massachusetts,” in the same manner that many of Apple’s products say, “Designed in California.”

Verizon Region President of New England Donna Cupelo

“That’s a great idea,” Gov. Patrick responded. “A great idea,” he repeated. “We don’t brag very well.” Gov. Patrick then shared a story of a recent conversation he had had with President Barack Obama, who had recently come to Massachusetts to help the governor fundraise for his upcoming re-election campaign. Gov. Patrick told the President that he didn’t like to brag about his accomplishments. According to Gov. Patrick, the President responded: “Get over it.”

To a question about what Massachusetts was doing to secure broadband funding from the federal stimulus package, Gov. Patrick explained that the state had very carefully laid the groundwork for federal investment. “We enacted a bonding bill to help seed, in conjunction with private investment, building the broadband infrastructure for the unserved customers in Western Massachusetts and the underserved customers on the Cape,” he said. “We are ahead of most other states. We have a plan in place,” he continued. The federal stimulus money will “turbo-charge” our efforts.

UMass President Jack Wilson

The governor’s comments underscored introductory remarks by Donna Cupelo, region president of New England for Verizon, who along with Paul Bosco of Cisco Systems, had provided the guiding leadership by the stakeholders for the study. She said that a “1 percent increase in broadband spending will result in a 2-3 percent growth in our economy.”

The governor also praised the leadership role of Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts, and his willingness to enter in collaborative projects with industry and government, such as the $100 million high-performance, green computing center now underway in Holyoke, a partnership with Boston University, MIT, Cisco, EMC Corporation, the City of Holyoke and the Commonwealth.

THE WATCHWORD ON THE Communispace web site is: “Your customers will tell you everything. Listen in.” For those in attendance – and for those following the event online, the roundtable discussion provided an opportunity to listen in as some of the top echelon leaders, in a freewheeling fashion, illuminated the fast-changing, innovative technology world in Massachusetts.

The participants were: (from left) Jeff Nick, senior vice president and CTO, EMC Corporation; Colin Angle, CEO, chairman of the board, and co-founder, iRobot; John D. Halamka, CIO, Harvard Medical School and CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Rich Miner, managing partner, Google Ventures, and co-founder of Android; Dave Balter, founder and CEO, BzzAgent Inc.; and Secretary Bialecki.

To begin the discussion, Secretary Bialecki asked the panel members to envision the world 10 years out by going back 10 years, to 1999, to measure the changes, a time of profound upheaval and disruption.

Colin Angle used a military analogy to describe the changing landscape. “Instead of a battlefield where tanks are deployed across a desert, the type of conflict our soldiers now face is a ‘Where’s Waldo’ in a sea of humanity. It changes the way we address threats.” Angle predicted that every squad of soldiers may soon have its own personal robot. On the home front, as our population continues to age, Angle posed the question: "How many Luddites will still push their vacuums?” instead of using robots, to increase their own ability to maintain their lifestyle and personal independence as they age.

Jeff Nick, who as leader of EMC Corporation’s Corporate Office of Technology, is responsible for defining the company’s evolving IT vision and culture, spoke about the changing culture at EMC, which had 2008 revenues of $14.9 billion and about 40,000 employees. Nick talked about building a social network among the company’s employees and forging connections where there had once been silos. “We are using social media to connect all EMC employees, using wikis and blogging,” he said. “We are encouraging dissemination of information and the ability of people to reach out and find each other. He defined his corporate view of EMC as building “power plants of information processing.”

Dave Balter, who launched his company in late 2001, is the advertising industry’s only cross-continental world-of-mouth media channel. He looked to the future, saying: “We are at the beginning of a huge next shift in the delivery of information, in shopping, in new kinds of social media connections in real time.” While he appreciated the content of the IT study, he said he couldn’t identify with the words “information technology.” Balter talked about how the skills needed were changing so rapidly, wondering out loud if he ever would hire another employee who couldn’t convert a PowerPoint presentation into PDF.

In turn, Rich Miner chose to look backward, identifying the paradigm shift 25 years ago, as computers moved from central company locations to worker desktops – with companies such as Wang and Digital leading the charge, it was great for the local companies, adding that those companies are “no longer there.” In the future, Miner said that to sustain Massachusetts’ emergence as a technology hub, there needed to be more large companies to anchor the industry here. “To train managers, to make them disgruntled, to make them go out and start their own company,” he said, with a laugh. He said that the family tree of innovation almost always goes back to large companies. Further, he said that we continue to undervalue education as a place for innovation.

John D. Halamka put the focus on e-Health, with the importance of the effort to digitize doctors’ medical records, saying that there are three ways to get doctors to take notice: “Pay them more, give them more time, and use public humiliation.” Halamka, an emergency room physician who blogs daily in addition to his other responsibilities, said that the way medical knowledge is taught and transferred has changed dramatically, with so much more information now available online. Every Harvard Medical School professor, Halamka said, now has an extensive profile published online, so that students who are looking for a mentor don’t have to spend hours trying to arrange personal meetings, but can use the internet to find the information they need to connect.

Yankee Group President & CEO Emily Green

Questions were fielded both from the audience and from the web by Emily Green, the president and CEO of The Yankee Group. From the audience, Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner, when asked for a comment, asked about the abolition of non-compete clauses, an issue he had raised at a previous session of digital technology thought leaders. The panel participants answered by drawing apt distinctions between non-competition and the importance of protecting intellectual property.

At the panel’s conclusion, Colin Angle spoke eloquently about the role of technology and its ability to elevate “the human element” – and not just for the most educated. In the future, he predicted, work will not be about physical location, but the skills in which we are connected to each other.

View the complete study here, commissioned by a consortium of corporate, industry association and government leaders including: Verizon, Cisco Systems, AT&T, Comcast, EMC Corporation, IBM, the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, Microsoft, TechAmerica, and MTC’s John Adams Innovation Institute.

View footage of the live webcast of the event here, co-sponsored by members of the IT Study Group, the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, and the Organizing Committee of the state’s IT Collaborative in partnership with the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, Massachusetts Network Communications Council, Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, TechAmerica New England, and the Massachusetts High Technology Council.

This information is brought to you as a courtesy of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's
John Adams Innovation Institute