All around the Commonwealth, there are efforts to support new business clusters, whether fostering marine technology start-ups near the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution or attracting clean-tech companies to a two-year-old incubator in Lynn. But looking back a few decades shows just how tough it is to create new clusters outside Greater Boston - whether bankrolled by state agencies or promoted by chambers of commerce and local entrepreneurs.
Back in the 1990s, two students who met at Williams College created a website and magazine geared to students about to enter the working world. By 1998, Tripod.com grew into the eighth-most-visited site on the Internet, and the company employed about 100 people - mainly recent college grads - in Williamstown. When the company was acquired that year for $58 million, it made its investors and early employees wealthy. But two years later, its new owner, the search portal Lycos, asked everyone to move to its Waltham headquarters or find a new job.
Cofounder Bo Peabody remained a vocal booster of the area, making it the home of a venture capital firm, Village Ventures, that would invest in smaller cities and college towns often overlooked by traditional venture firms. But these days, Peabody and Village Ventures cofounder Matt Harris live in New York. Just eight administrative employees of Village Ventures remain in Williamstown. “It was hard to scale the business in Williamstown,’’ says Harris.
Tim Rowe, founder of the Cambridge Innovation Center, says cheap office space and the lower cost of living promoted by regions outside of Boston are not enough to spawn a cluster. Entrepreneurs want to be around other entrepreneurs, he says, and they often want to be close to universities. “To be an authentic cluster, it has to be a place where smart people would say, ‘This is the right place for me,’ ’’ says Rowe.
