MEDITECH's Co-Founder Shares Technology Innovation Perspectives on NPR Podcast
Earlier this month, Boston's NPR station (WBUR) interviewed MIT Professor and MEDITECH Co-Founder Dr. Edward Roberts on its one-hour podcast show,
Radio Boston. You can listen to the entire podcast, titled "Is Massachusetts Poised to Lead the Recovery?", on WBUR's
Web
site. Dr. Robert's interview begins during the middle part of the program, starting at 30:24 and ending at 40:47.
We've also transcribed the questions and answers with Dr. Roberts below.
Is Massachusetts Poised to Lead the Recovery?
Posted Wednesday, October 7th, 2009, Show airs 10/09/2009
(30:24-30:52)
HOST: I want to bring in another perspective here, Ed Roberts, professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at MIT. Thank you for your time, Professor Roberts. What's your take on all this? MIT played a key role in the founding of A123 Systems, the company we spoke about earlier in the program. It's the Watertown battery maker that's building a manufacturing plant in Michigan. Is all this innovation in Massachusetts really creating jobs
(to your minds) for regular folks or not?
(30:52-32:34)
Dr. Roberts: Well it's creating jobs for regular folks at all levels of support, as well as if you allow engineers to be regarded as regular folks. It's creating a lot of engineering jobs in Massachusetts, which is significant to the economy. A123 is a very good point. It illustrates something that needs to be considered. I've heard many of your speakers now talk about optimism. There's a second thing they need to talk about, which is patience. And A123 actually is a great exception to patience; it was founded only in 2001. And I issued a report in February of this year called "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT," in which we did a total study of all MIT alumni entrepreneurs. And it happens that A123, of course, was in the sample. Two of the three co-founders of A123 were MIT alums, one was an MIT professor. By 2006, they already were up to 1800 employees.
Now, you should understand that that's extraordinary. That is not a usual course of events. Typically for a company to get up to--a new company, even technically based--to get up to 1000 employees, takes 15-20 years. So patience is critical. And the work that's going on today in the green economy, so-called, in clean tech and biotech and the like, typically will have a lagged effect on the state.
Now, we may be ahead of lots of other parts of the country in where we're moving, but we shouldn't assume that huge numbers of jobs are going to get created inside of one, two, three, four, five years.
(32:34-32:55)
HOST: Well, let me ask you about that one point, because you say A123 built up this company pretty quickly, but most of the manufacturing that they're doing is out of the state, in Michigan and China. So is that a viable model: cutting edge technology developed in Massachusetts but really built elsewhere?
(32:55-34:55)
Dr. Roberts: Well it's characteristic of some companies, not of others. So the biotech companies that have been founded in Massachusetts, I would say for the most part, have their primary employment in Massachusetts. The same thing is true of the previous generation of companies that still are the dominant companies, and those are the ones in the information technology field. So if you look at information technology, which may be the primary technical employer in this state, I would say that probably the bulk of their employment is in this state. And they aren't all programmers, there's salesmen, and there's support personnel. There's clerical workers and office managers and maintenance people that are all around.
An example, I co-founded MEDITECH in 1969. Just think about how long ago that was. Well, MEDITECH now has 2800 employees, all in Massachusetts, deliberately because of the policies of the company to locate all of our office space here in Massachusetts. And we just built the first brand new facility in Fall River, again because we decided that that was a great place to open new job opportunities with a building that can house 600 new employees. So you really have to take a mixture of aspirations. You've got to look at the old, solid technologies--that's information technology, electronics, and the like. You look at the technologies that have been coming along for a couple of decades, that's biotechnology--and by the way biotechnology needs to be better understood, really better than I think it is. Then you look at the new ones, the energy technologies and especially the clean tech, and you should assume that each of those in time may become a very dominant source of job creation in the state. And you have to nurture each of them in a different way.
(38:40-38:50)
HOST: Professor Roberts from MIT, let me bring you back into this. The state of Massachusetts of course has been through recessions before. Can you point to industries that have led the state out of economic downturns in the past?
(38:50-40:47)
Dr. Roberts: Well, when you say "led," that's a tough question--but I would say that the medical field as a whole has been a mainstay and a growth area. And that's why I said before we have to be careful what we mean when we use the word "biotech." If we use it strictly, we're talking about something that's primarily science and pharmaceutically oriented, and that doesn't yet account for very many jobs. Although we've imported a lot of companies from the rest of the world to come to Massachusetts, because of everything that's going on in research and development.
A greater growth area that is medical technology is in the medical devices field, and there, Massachusetts is doing a phenomenal job of growing one after another medical device companies. An example of a company that took a decade to grow is Inverness Medical. Inverness Medical is headquartered in Waltham, and it grew to the point of having several thousand employees. Now, to be sure, a bunch of those employees were in Scotland. They're not all in China and they're not all in Michigan, they're distributed all around the world. And then in the second generation of the company, they've now grown enormously.
But every company like that that grows, A123 as an example. If they have a high technology base, they're going to produce a series of spinoff companies by other high tech people with new ideas, that are going to leave the original firm and start new companies. They're going to start those companies in Massachusetts. So I would bet that inside of five years, there's a half a dozen to a dozen companies where the founders came out of A123, and they're going to be located around Watertown and Cambridge. Some of those are going to locate their manufacturing jobs here. So you really have to take this perspective of sort of the multiplier effect.