ABSTRACT
Boston’s post-war technology corridor, which is often assumed to have been a spontaneous development, is the result of specific initiatives taken earlier in the century. An innovative strategy for knowledge-based economic development led to the creation of the Route 128 complex during the early post-war era. In this new model, universities, traditionally knowledge producers and transmitters, have also become factors of production. During the 1930s depression, MIT President Karl Compton hypothesized that New England’s research-intensive universities could substitute for the natural resources that the region largely lacked. He extrapolated instances of firm formation by MIT professors into a model of university-based economic development which built upon the comparative advantage of New England, its concentration of research resources in its colleges and universities
A strategy of assisting firm formation based upon academic research originated early in the twentieth century as part of a new thesis of science-based regional economic development set forth in the 1930s by a group of MIT administrators. Much of this model was derived from the activities of Vannevar Bush, who had been involved in entrepreneurial activities during the 1920s. In his own experience with technology transfer, Bush went well beyond capturing ownership of intellectual property rights. He was a prototypical entrepreneurial academic, combining in a very effective manner both intellectual and commercial interests in the course of his career. Through his own experience with the patents system as a young academic, Bush had learned that a patent merely secured legal rights to intellectual property; it was no guarantee that anything profitable would come of it.1 He determined that if existing firms were not ready to take up an innovation that it was necessary to found a new one.
