If Silicon Valley was the pinnacle of technology in the IT and Internet era, Boston is now the leader in biomedicine.
From reclaimed land to today's biomedical mecca, the city of Boston has been around for nearly 400 years. It was the site of the Tea Dumping Incident, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the center of American manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. Boston created the "Marseilles Miracle" during the Industrial Revolution, and then fell under the weight of the financial crisis and Silicon Valley.
With the advent of the "bio-century," Boston is back at the top of the innovation ladder. Although Silicon Valley is still the venture capital list of No. 1, but in the field of life sciences financing, Boston has long surpassed Silicon Valley. The U.S. top ten biopharmaceutical clusters "genetic engineering and biotechnology list, Boston has beaten Silicon Valley for the fourth consecutive time, at the top of the list.
Silicon Valley and Boston have long been recognized as the two jewels of American technology and innovation. But unlike Silicon Valley, which is driven by IT and technology, Boston has been nicknamed "Gene City". Here gathered AstraZeneca, Thermo Fisher, Novartis, Pfizer and other more than 2,000 from the global life science field of scientific research institutions and enterprises, ranked in the United States of America's life sciences industry, the top five places to find jobs.
Looking back at Boston's history, you'll see that Boston's success is no accident. It is home to more than 30 colleges and universities and more than 40 research hospitals, including MIT and Harvard, as well as some of the leading pharmaceutical and device companies in the life sciences industry. The city is a perfect blend of technology and innovation, with the government, venture capitalists, scientific research institutions, large corporations, and innovative companies each playing their own role, forming a virtuous ecological cycle of incubation and nourishment for innovation.
Boston's history dates back to 1630, when several missionaries from Boston, England founded the city on the Shawmut Peninsula. The city was also named Boston as an expression of nostalgia for their homeland. After reclaiming land that lasted for a hundred years, Boston today has grown into a smart city with an area of 232.1 square kilometers and a population of more than 600,000 people.
In the mid-19th century, the rapid growth of the Colonial Railroad led to the development of industry in Boston's South Bay, with iron foundries, machine shops, shipyards, and refineries everywhere. Even throughout the twentieth century, the shipbuilding and railroad industries provided a great deal of work for the residents of Boston's South Bay and were the primary drivers of regional economic growth.
In 1861, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was founded on the banks of the Charles River in Boston. Early on, the university focused on applied sciences and engineering to promote regional manufacturing. During World War II, MIT quickly rose to prominence by making outstanding contributions to the field of defense science and technology. Boston's industries benefited from its proximity. MIT encouraged researchers to commercialize their research, and industrial-era companies such as Raytheon and Polaroid were subsequently founded, all of which were born out of MIT.
With the help of MIT, Boston's manufacturing sector grew by leaps and bounds. As a result, the city suffered from population growth, traffic congestion, and other "big-city diseases. In order to solve this problem, Boston launched a suburbanization program to solve these problems, the center of gravity of the manufacturing industry to a half-ring road built in 1951 to expand. This highway is known as Route 128, and it has become known as the "128 Innovation Corridor" because of the thousands of technology and innovation companies that line the highway.
More than half a century ago, Highway 128 was home to small computer companies, and at one time it was a world-renowned center of the electronics industry, ahead of Silicon Valley. Affected by the U.S. Great Depression, the government's military orders continued to decrease, and a large number of companies in the United States in the 1970s closed down and unemployment rose. However, the industrial base of Highway 128 helped Boston to go wild, with the rapid rise of Digido, Olson, DataGeneral, Wangan Computer Corporation and Apollo Computer and other electronic companies. Boston has realized the transformation of manufacturing industry to electronic industry in ten years, which is known as "East Silicon Valley". In the context of the great shift in manufacturing, Boston has realized the manufacturing industry's growth against the trend, was called the "Massachusetts Miracle".
This period is the highlight of Boston. However, dramatically, the "Silicon Valley of the East" was not able to continue its success in the PC wave that followed. Boston's innovation relied heavily on MIT, and entrepreneurs wanted to continue the tradition of independent innovation, but this strategy made them gradually become islands of innovation, and the Internet wave and the rise of Silicon Valley made them gradually fade into the public eye.
In 2004, Zuckerberg left with Facebook, and the "Silicon Valley of the East" came to an end. But was that the end of the Boston story? Not really.
In the 21st century, the needs of society began to shift from focusing on quality of life to pursuing quality of life. During this period, a large number of chemical patents expired, and pharmaceutical companies encountered bottlenecks in the discovery of new drugs in the chemical industry, and they were eager to find new opportunities. Boston, with its concentration of universities, became their mecca. With the innovative resources and intellectual resources in the field of life sciences, Boston has risen to the top, and the Boston city government has steadily seized the opportunity given to them by the times, uniting scientific research units and venture capital organizations, they have attracted large-scale companies, incubated innovative enterprises, and ultimately formed an ecology that allows innovation to wander and circulate, allowing Boston to return to the top of the scientific and technological ladder once again in the space of 20 years.
Although the patent laws of the 1980s allowed the Boston area to start investing more in biotech, the real rise of the industry began with the arrival of pharmaceutical companies in the millennium.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the completion of the Human Genome Project, a "life sciences moonshot," was announced, taking human knowledge of genetics to a new level. As participants in the program, MIT and Harvard had unrivaled influence in the field of genetics. Add to this the fact that Boston is home to some of the best teaching and research hospitals in the United States, and pharmaceutical companies are flocking to the city.
The research base and the presence of large pharmaceutical companies were prerequisites for the rise of the biopharmaceutical industry in Boston, and the government sensed an opportunity in the meantime.
In 2008, the governor of Massachusetts announced the passage of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Act, which provided $1 billion over 10 years from the state to advance the biotech industry. This bill was extended for another five years in 2018, with an additional $500 million from the state to advance the biotech industry.
At the top of the list, naturally, is the incubation of Boston's homegrown innovation resources. Boston's Cambridge City walled off the educational heavyweight metropolis, and is by far the most concentrated area of innovation in Boston. Cambridge's Kendall Square and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ah only one street away, gathered hundreds of the world's top biomedical companies, but also Google, Microsoft, Pfizer and other giants resident.
MIT has been a central driver in the development of Kendall Square. At the end of the last century, the City of Cambridge began a renovation plan for Kendall Square, and the government positioned Kendall Square as an innovation nursery serving the metropolitan area, providing startups with supporting services and an ecological environment for technology commercialization. Amenities are also a focus of the transformation. A cross-regional subway from Cambridge to the Metroplex links Kendall Square and Harvard Square; and a riverfront recreational street along the Charles River provides a comfortable environment for innovators.
In 2016 and 2017, then-Governor Charlie Baker unveiled the "Bridge to Innovation" and "Life Sciences 2.0" programs to further enhance the innovation and entrepreneurship atmosphere around Kendall Square. The "Bridge to Innovation" program attracts non-profit organizations, businesses, and academic institutions to collaborate with the government on innovation through various innovation forums and seminars; and the "Life Sciences 2.0" program plans to invest $500 million in life sciences infrastructure, research and development, and workforce training. The Life Sciences 2.0 program invests $500 million in life sciences infrastructure, research and development, and workforce training. The combination of location, incubator space, innovation nodes, and living environments have made Kendall Square known as the "Wall Street of Life Sciences".
Boston is also home to the U.S. healthcare industry, with six of the top ten hospitals in the U.S. ranked by the Federal Research Foundation. Since 1995, the Boston government has helped six hospitals apply for NIH grants. The state government also allocates additional funds to support the development of research hospitals. Behind the massive investment in research, the Boston government has reaped fame and fortune. These hospitals have become global centers for research and diagnosis and treatment of difficult diseases. On the other hand, Boston is even farther ahead of the average revenue of U.S. hospitals in terms of revenue from hospital operations.
Not only that, but the government's policy preferences are also evident in the taxation. For the life sciences sector, not only enterprises and investment organizations can enjoy tax incentives, but also individuals working in the industry can get a certain percentage of tax relief. Not in 2018 the state government also introduced a special field tax credit bill, the life sciences field of enterprises, individual tax preferential treatment continues to increase.
In the city, the government has virtually infiltrated the soil with an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and innovation. 2010, Boston launched the "Innovate Boston" strategy. Then Mayor Thomas Menino initiative to transform this place into an urban space suitable for incubating innovation and entrepreneurship. This was the first official innovation district in the United States.
The government set up the Innovation Center at City Hall to serve the entrepreneurial community, with more than 1,000 square meters of space that not only has an open office area and meeting rooms, but also provides many low-cost or even free services and facilities to attract and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and provides a comfortable business space with a business atmosphere for entrepreneurship.
In order to solve the problem of entrepreneurs who do not have enough money to buy a condominium, Boston also customized low-cost talent apartments for them. To that end, the city even revised its housing standards, reducing the original 50 square meter apartment standard to a minimum of 28 square meters.
In order to retain talent, Massachusetts also passed a non-compete agreement application bill in 2016, which restricts individual talent from jumping ship within the same industry organization. The original intent of the bill was to protect talent in the organization, but it was also controversial because of the restrictions on talent mobility. The District of California has outright banned enforcement of the agreement.
While the city's construction provides space for innovation and entrepreneurship, what really makes the water flow in this ecosystem is actually the resources of colleges, universities, and research institutions that are clustered in the city of Cambridge and the metropolitan area.
The Boston region is home to more than 40 of the world's top universities, including Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Boston University. It is also home to high-quality clinical resources such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the New England Medical Center, as well as a number of world-leading clusters of disciplines and laboratories in the life sciences, molecular biology, new materials, and chemistry, among other related research areas. These research institutions not only educate the world's biotechnology innovators, they are also the birthplaces of innovation, influencing the global life sciences industry.
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Translational Systems Across Half a Century
If you turn the clock back to 1989, there were basically no U.S. universities facilitating the translation of technology, and the U.S. had little advantage over the rest of the world. The reason why these research and innovation results can go to the market, and even influence the world, in fact, rely heavily on the reform of the U.S. intellectual property system. After the Baidu Act, innovation patents were transferred from researchers to institutions. As a result, university administrators have become more proactive in promoting the transformation of technology into industry, creating a better environment for researchers to transform innovation.
Taking Harvard University as an example, in 1947, the Harvard Business School took the lead in offering entrepreneurship education programs around the world, however, before 1984, this program was slow to develop, and even said to be in the doldrums. Encouraged by the reform of the patent system, Harvard Business School revitalized and eventually formed a set of "compulsory elective combination", covering the master's degree, doctoral degree, and continuing education course system. Ultimately, the success of Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and other representatives in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Harvard innovation and entrepreneurship education was pushed to the height of a school-wide era.
In 2011, Harvard invested $20 million in the Innovation Lab, whose purpose is to promote the participation of current students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and community members in the town of Allston and Boston in team-based entrepreneurial activities. The lab also organizes entrepreneurial competitions such as the President's Challenge Award, the Dean's Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge Award, and the Dean's Challenge Award in Health and Life Sciences to encourage students and alumni to engage in innovative entrepreneurship. Vaxess Technologies, a project that received an investment from Bill Gates, was a semifinalist in the 2012 President's Challenge.
The lab consists of three components, i-Lab, Launch Lab-X, and The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, which aims to connect Harvard's innovation resources with Boston, and global, industries.
The i-Lab is open to all full-time students and provides one-on-one startup counseling, access to current stage manpower and space resources, and even help in finding industry experts to advise them. i-Lab also has a 12-week startup incubation program, where selected entrepreneurs not only gain access to the i-Lab's labs, but also participate in the labs' roundtables, entrepreneur dinners, and industry events. roundtables, entrepreneur dinners, and exclusive advice from industry experts.
Launch Lab-X, on the other hand, is alumni-focused, targeting alumni and entrepreneurs coming out of Harvard and providing them with support for innovation and entrepreneurship. The lab has a training program for alumni, which is a 9-month program divided into 3 sessions, and in addition to early autonomy, the program provides sustainable business support.
The Pagulica Harvard Life Lab is Harvard's third entrepreneurship center on Western Avenue, endowed by business school alumni Judy and Stephen Pagliuca. This fully equipped, 15,000-square-foot lab focuses on providing entrepreneurial space for early-stage startups. The Pagulica Harvard Life Lab has a broader reach than the first two, and is geared toward students, faculty, scientists, and scholars.
MIT's impact on Boston's innovation drive is more long-standing. The school has made innovation and entrepreneurship education a key development strategy since 1990, when it established its own Center for Entrepreneurship, which provides one-on-one, through-the-line mentoring services to students and faculty across the university, and over the decades, has also developed a unique system of transformation.
MIT has an award known as the "Oscars of Inventors", the Lemelson Prize, which honors inventors who have made a significant contribution to improving the world in the middle of their careers. The award, which was originally intended only for the school to encourage invention and innovation, has now become an influential award in the global scientific community. In addition to the Office of Technology Transfer, which is a standard feature of the award, MIT also has a separate Glitter Center to help scientists improve their business plans and form companies.
For students, faculty, and alumni, the school has formed more than 80 innovation and entrepreneurship organizations that offer customized courses, mentoring, and events for innovation teams. In addition, the school has developed a set of innovation benchmarking principles to quantify the starting point and elements of innovation, such as improving the quality of human life, the cross-cutting nature of the research content, and the originality of the direction, so as to make it easier for innovation to take root. Not only that, the school has maintained an open and respectful attitude towards some of the inventions, such as the robotics company iRobot, in fact, the original origin of the school a game of "identify Rhodes".
In addition, in order to help innovation into a more easily transformed, the school joined the government, enterprises to form an ecological network called "Industrial Liaison Program". It is understood that more than 1,700 companies, 800 of which are world-class, have been connected to this ecological network.
Schools and even companies signed a cooperation obligation to help companies take the initiative to contact the school's innovative projects, for example, the famous MIT Media Lab launched the "Molecular Machines" project, which has been funded by many pharmaceutical companies to solve the problem of drug efficacy design through interdisciplinary collaboration, such as genome engineering, machine learning, bioinformatics, and so on.
It is reported that the school is approached by an average of 600 collaborative projects each year, and for commercially viable projects, companies buy patents or incubate them. This approach also provides the opportunity for more teams from non-life science fields to join in the development of the industry.
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"Dismantling the Walls," Harvard and MIT's Collaborative Innovation
The Broad Institute was founded in 2004 under the auspices of Eli and Edythe Broad. funded by Eli and Edythe Broad, which was built by MIT, Harvard and its affiliated hospitals***, and is dedicated to exploring treatments and prevention of cancer, psychiatric disorders, and infectious diseases through genomics research. In terms of differentiation, Harvard's strength lies in basic theoretical research in chemical biology, MIT's strength lies in bioengineering, and Harvard-affiliated hospitals' strength lies in clinical medicine, the Boulder Institute integrates the scholarship of discovery and the scholarship of application. The combination of the strengths of these parties realizes the mutual transformation of explicit and tacit knowledge, and promotes breakthrough innovation in biomedicine.
The Boulder Institute grew out of a virtual network of life science researchers at MIT and Harvard University during the Human Genome Project. This network is capable of realizing the integration of knowledge, technology and applications, and promoting the intersection, penetration and integration of disciplines, leading to significant inventions and creations. However, the blurring of the boundaries of virtual organizations and the mobility of personnel can adversely affect interdisciplinary collaborative projects that require long-term follow-up and basic research. At the same time, in order to internalize knowledge spillovers, physical academic organizations are also needed to break through closed interdisciplinary research within universities and form open organizational innovation networks.
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Research culture: what it can do for humanity
The push at the university level facilitates the translation of the results, yet the reason why these research results can have an impact on life sciences globally is really related to the laboratory innovation itself.
"When we do research, we first think about what benefit such research can bring to humanity." Arlene Sharp, co-chair of Harvard's Department of Microbiology and Immunology, told us in an interview that researchers focus more on societal needs in their research projects.
The university is surrounded by venture capital firms and pharmaceutical companies, which maintain long-term relationships with researchers through "residency programs" and "university translational platforms," and when they have a need for research, they will ask researchers to collaborate. When they have research needs, they will ask researchers to collaborate with them. On the researchers' side, they are also accustomed to the culture of translational innovation, and when they realize that their basic research can be applied to industry, they will take the initiative to get in touch with industry.
Boston is the birthplace of venture capital in the U.S. With the establishment of the Life Sciences Center in Massachusetts, the state is supporting the growth of startups while attracting social capital. Accelerated by government demonstrations, startup investment in life sciences in the Boston area exceeded $8 billion in 2018 alone. While not yet comparable to Silicon Valley, Boston has no shortage of companies to invest in. VCs play an important role in Boston's innovation ecosystem. Life science research and development cycle is long, high investment, high risk, in Boston's innovation ecosystem, venture capital growth agent.
Boston is the third largest financial center in the U.S. and the largest fund management center in the country, where many top investment firms are headquartered, providing critical capital support for innovative research and translation.In 2019, venture capital funding in the life sciences sector in the Boston area reached $4.7 billion, accounting for 24.6% of the total U.S. life sciences VC funding, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in This has generated tens of billions of dollars in GDP and created more than 110,000 jobs, making the health services sector an "enabler" of Boston's economic development.
Compared to Silicon Valley, Boston's venture capital organizations are more pragmatic, emphasizing intellectual property and technological innovation. Most of the venture capital organizations in Boston have executive backgrounds in pharmaceutical companies, or are scientists with years of research experience. This sets the tone for Boston's venture capital organizations. The high concentration of research resources and professional investors allows venture capital to move forward past the incubation stage.
The transformation of scientists' results is nothing more than the transfer and self-transformation of two kinds, the former through the transfer of patents to large pharmaceutical companies or direct horizontal cooperation, but if you want to self-transformation, it is indispensable to the support of venture capital institutions. chain in tandem.
From the footsteps of historical happenings, big pharma companies were the first industrial players to discover Boston's potential. Pfizer, Novartis, and other giant drug companies settled in and set the tone for Boston's industry. These drug companies saw the future direction of the life sciences sector when they were facing bottlenecks in development, and they made the right bets and chose the right places. It was only after the government saw these drug companies settling in that it decided to make life sciences a new strategy for local development.
On the one hand, the big pharmaceutical companies are the "ambience bearers" of Boston, and their gathering is the "Jerusalem" of the life sciences field in Boston, which provides employment for a large number of graduates here almost; on the other hand, they also attracted the talent On the other hand, they also attract talents to come here. Many of Boston's investors are former pharmaceutical executives, and it can be argued that Boston's venture capital industry today was actually founded by Big Pharma.
Big Pharma is selecting innovations and scaling them up in Boston, and at the same time, they are providing scientists with directions and outlets for their innovations. Hot investment tracks in life sciences, such as PD-1, CAR-T, and gene therapy, are actually moving from the lab to the industry through the incubation and participation of big pharma. With the participation and help of Big Pharma, the research results buried in the labs were eventually able to influence the global trend in the life science field.
With the source of innovation in Boston, the talent to innovate in Boston, the capital in Boston, and the obvious policy bias of the local government, what reason is there for an innovative company to choose any other place? As a result, Boston has formed a complete biomedical innovation ecosystem, which has attracted and nurtured a large number of innovative companies to settle here. The gathering of innovative companies and their successes have ultimately led to the formation of a closed loop ecosystem, where a large number of successful experiences have solidified the innovation gene and inspired more people and companies to come here and continue to write the story of Boston's innovation.
Anchored by universities and research institutions, Boston has a unique closed-loop innovation ecosystem that integrates government, research institutions, venture capital organizations, large corporations, and innovative companies. These units are tightly linked by a mechanism of interest, ultimately forming a synergistic ****-born innovation ecosystem:
The government provides long-term policy support to create an atmosphere and urban space suitable for innovation; universities provide innovation resources and produce talents; venture capital institutions provide key capital support for innovation; large companies provide opportunities and carriers for the realization of the value of the results of innovation; innovation companies are the The innovation company is the fruit of industrial guidance and fruit transformation, and is also an important symbol of the virtuous cycle of the ecology.
So what can Boston's experience teach us about the transformation of research results in China?
Over the past few months, the Artery Orange Fruit Bureau has analyzed the transformation and innovation paths of many countries and regions, as well as the transformation experiences of overseas universities and hospitals, in the hope of finding clues that can promote the transformation of domestic achievements through the dismantling of a large number of cases. In fact, these experiences have long been influencing the construction of the results transformation system of domestic scientific research institutions, for example, in recent years, major universities and scientific research institutions set up the "Incubation Center", "Industrial Research Institute", most of which can be seen with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University transformation innovation similar to the shadow. The shadow of innovation is similar to that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
After a few years of promotion and exploration, we can actually see the results of the transformation of domestic scientific research results. However, looking at the industry, the current program of scientific research results and startups is still a spark. But the promotion of the transformation of scientific research results is not just universities, scientific research results of their own things, perhaps in addition to a single dimension of the transformation of scientific research results of the exploration of the system, but also need to be local governments, venture capital organizations, large companies in the industry *** with the efforts of the formation of a virtuous cycle of innovation to the ecology. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new one, and you'll be able to do that.