Route 128 may have become a run-of-the-mill strip of expensive Boston real estate, but the myth still looms large. It is where the technology boom of the last half of the 20th century got going. It is the strip that launched a thousand articles. Silicon Valley is an upstart in comparison.
How did this Boston, or Cambridge Massachusetts if you want to be picky, drag come about? Was it really all down to MIT and its bright scientists? If so, is there anything we can all learn from the place? Like bribing a load of future Nobel laureates to move in and lift the neighbourhood?
MIT is, after all, the institution that Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Prime Minister “in waiting,” turned to for lessons in how to turn research into innovation into profits, resulting in the controversial Cambridge MIT Institute.
Rory P. O’Shea and a bunch of too many colleagues to name have written a paper on the subject in the journal R&D Management (vol. 37, issue 1, 2007). Their assessment, “Delineating the anatomy of an entrepreneurial university: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experience,” is that MIT’s success is a multifaceted phenomenon.
They focus on MIT’s role as a spinner out of companies. While earlier studies looked at different bits of the process, O’Shea et al. reckon to have put the package together.
The abstract says it all really. “The highly complex mechanism of spinoff generation is typically considered the result of either the characteristics of individuals, organizational policies and structures, organizational culture, or the external environment. Explanations of spinoff activity have in the main focused on only one of these dimensions at a time.”
Heed MIT, they say, but don’t go overboard. (They don’t talk of the wisdom of putting £60 million of taxpayers' money into an attempt to clone MIT in the UK.) “We argue that university administrators and academics can learn from the case of MIT, but that efforts at transposing or replicating single elements of MIT’s model may only have limited success, given the inter-related nature of the drivers of spinoff activity.”
Juicy quotes:
“… the MIT story is about a formal, deliberate approach to commercialization, which is supported by a university mission advocated by university leaders who view MIT operating with industry”
“… four attributes of a university are important in supporting spinoff activity. These are the science and engineering base of the university; the quality of research by university staff; the commitment to spinoff activity within management in the university … ; and the culture within the university”.
“… the regional context influences the level of spinoff from a university.”
“… a simplistic attempt by an institution to replicate and transpose current policies and practices without a deeper and more holistic understanding of both their own history and MIT’s history will probably be unsuccessful as they ignore the inter-related nature of the drivers of spinoff activity.”
Receive the Funding Newswire each Tuesday, our Policy Bulletin each Thursday, and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
A unique international forum for public research organisations and companies to connect their external engagement with strategic interests around their R&D system.