The One Minute Geographer: Massachusetts (8): The Most Innovative Square Mile on the Planet
Let’s start with this: The square mile around Boston’s Kendall Square, near MIT and Harvard, may be the world’s largest R&D cluster in the biosciences. It’s also been called ‘the epicenter of the biotech world’ and ‘the life sciences center of the universe.’ I’ll call it Silicon Valley East.
It started with high-tech in general. Boston’s inner beltway used to be called the “Route 128 Corridor.” It grew up with the high-tech industry boom when industrial parks and office buildings started suburbanizing, and it became famous as Boston’s equivalent to Silicon Valley. That old state road, Route 128, is now part of the I-95 ring around Boston.
Many of those initial pioneer boom companies lining the roadway have gone by the wayside or have consolidated with other firms in the constant churn of the high-tech field (Wang, Digital Equipment, Data General, Lotus). But some are still powerhouses (Raytheon, Analogic, Dell) and many others have formed since then.
Dell still maintains one of the state’s largest employment sites with 9,000 workers in Hopkinton. Two other examples: Bose (speakers) started at a MIT incubator in 1964. While it manufactures products worldwide, it has about 2,000 employees in Massachusetts at its headquarters and factory in…
