Boston is not being all that it actually is

October 31, 2011|By Scott Kirsner, Globe Correspondent

Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog.

If you are an ambitious young person and you want to make it in the movies, country music, or advertising, you know where to go: Hollywood, Nashville, or New York.

If you want to be the next Zuckerberg or Jobs, you head for Silicon Valley.

Why do people come to Boston?

The most common answer, I think, is to get an education.

And that’s wonderful if you are employed by one of our region’s great universities. But not so great if you work outside of higher education or care about Massachusetts’ economic health over the long haul.

Right now, Massachusetts has an Avis strategy without the Avis motivation: “We’re number two, but our sense of entitlement keeps us from trying harder.’’

We’re a second-tier financial services town. Second-tier technology town. Second-tier retail town. Second-tier defense contracting town.

That does not attract the best talent in the world, and it does not give you a strong position in the global economy. It leaves you to play a retention game - let’s try our best to hold on to the people who grew up here, or who got a degree here - rather than an attraction game.

It also leaves you exposed to sniping from boosters of the top-tier locales, seeking to attract even more talent to their companies.

For example, Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape, told The Economist that “a massive brain drain from Boston to the Valley … has all but gutted Boston as a place for high-tech entrepreneurship.’’

Rather than letting others define us as past our prime in industries like high technology, we need to do a better job of explaining where we are leading the world.

I think Boston can make a compelling argument that we are the nucleus of the 21st century life-sciences business. All the key players are here, from big pharmaceutical companies to small biotechs to teaching hospitals to e-health care pioneers to makers of medical devices.

And the companies and research institutions based here can lure the best scientists from around the world.

In digital marketing, the trade group MITX has done well in the past two years with its FutureM Week to position Boston as the epicenter of people and companies thinking about the future of marketing. The message that FutureM sends: “Madison Avenue and ‘Mad Men’ knew how to move product in the 20th century. We’re thinking about how things get sold in the 21st.’’

There’s obviously potential for so much more: Boston can make a good case to be the nexus of thinking about how technology can improve the classroom experience; how we can produce energy and consume it in a cleaner, more efficient way; and in developing next-generation robots for defense, manufacturing, logistics, and scrubbing floors.