The interest is global, and the question not a difficult one
to ask: what makes Kendall Square tick?
Answering it is nowhere near as easy.
The underlying question is what are the component parts of a
successful innovation cluster.
I spent this past week recording my observations as I toured
the place with visitors who are eager to see an innovation cluster spring up in
their part of the globe. Witnessing this peculiar Cambridge phenomenon through
the viewpoint of others impelled me to organize my thoughts into
categories.
The most basic formulation was a split between what I call
“hard” and “soft” planning.
“Hard” planning refers to physical planning
– tangible things – roads, transit, buildings, open space, heights, proportions,
widths, etc.
“Soft” planning has more to do with the culture of
innovation and the less tangible components of creating an eco-system that can
flourish organically.
Indeed, what struck me most was not the physical planning
challenges as they exist in Kendall Square, but the cultural planning
challenges associated with the innovation economy.
Here are some of my observations:
SOFT PLANNING
I put the soft planning issues first because
I feel those are the more important ones, and the more difficult ones to
instigate, cultivate, nurture, and make real.
The least experienced are the most important. This one might be called Support the Students
– the young talent. In the end, they drive much of the model.
Turn hierarchies on their head. In some ways, the innovation economy turns
typical hierarchies on their head. The
most important input into the system is the young, energetic, inventive,
creative, risk-loving entrepreneur. They
are the most important piece in part because life hasn't taught them to be
cautious, to be wary, to be prudent.
Design for randomness. In this model, chance and randomness
play an important, indeed critical role. It may sound funny, but for cultures
where the word “serendipity” doesn’t exist, it needs to be invented. It is actually a big
issue. Cambridge Innovation Center is a place where the mantra of serendipity
is repeated everyday. The amount of
financial resources dedicated to encouraging these random interactions is truly
staggering. The theory is that the placing of skills and talents in one dense
location and encouraging their mixing will produce the random encounter that
will prove to be the most valuable meeting of the day.
Do not fear failure.
It was striking how often we heard on this tour that failure is an
important part of the system of the innovation economy. It is the willingness of the whole system to
accept failure and not judge it that is important to the success of the system
as a whole.
Don't punish failure.
The most illustrative example of this phenomenon can be found at the
Cambridge Innovation Center, where they operate everything on a 30 day
lease. Your busy grows, you rent another
30 days. Your business fails, you're out
of your lease in 30 days. You don't have
to worry that even if your business fails, you're stuck with 6 or 12 months on a
lease for space you don't need.
Encourage risk taking.
Reducing the downside to failure promotes this upside, the slightly reckless abandon of belief in oneself and one's ideas and their ultimate worth and their capacity to be implementable.
Banish the bureaucrats.
There is a strong need to break the traditional hierarchies of
bureaucracy and bureaucratic power.
Running into a cultural barrier of power and privilege can and will prevent creating a truly innovative environment and workspace. We were told repeatedly that the role of
government at any level -- local, state, federal -- in Kendall Square is almost
nil.
Add other amenities. I believe there are correlated aspects
to this innovation world. In other words, where you find one, you find
the other. Here are a few:
- Bike culture – as noted elsewhere on this blog, biking has
increased 150 percent in ten years.
- Local food (locavore) and community gardens is another.
- Industrial arts should be nurtured. There are very similar ideas and common
themes found in places like the Artist Asylum in Somerville and in the
Cambridge Innovation Center. The point is -- where you have true innovation
clusters, you find these other things in conjunction.
Let demand drive the model.
There is wisdom in crowds.
And finally …
Know thyself. Just as
Plato urged almost 2,500 years ago, it is very important to know who you are in
this world of innovation. These spaces
and places have/get an identity over time. It is important to realize your
niche, both within your regional context, and in the global context.
HARD PLANNING
Of course, there are many hard planning components to this. Indeed, most of the attention seems to focus on the tangible items. These are a few that readily come to mind.
Put it on/near public transit. As part of the anti-car culture, the need for
easy, quick ways to move lots of people in an environmentally-friendly way.
Build it dense. If you need to go to a meeting, you hop into
the elevator and go to the 11th floor, you don't hop in your car and drive 30
minutes to San Jose (as in, the Silicon Valley).
Slow down the cars.
Our sense of urban streetscape has become increasingly focused on
getting people out of their cars, and putting them on the streets, either on
foot or on a bike. One way to do this is
to slow the cars.
Enhance retail.
Streetscape and street life have become increasingly important and one
mechanism to do that is to promote the strength of ground floor retail. More than anything else, an effective retail
plan needs intensive management and persistence in doing it.
Let the street layout work FOR you, not against you. In the same way that interior spaces are
designed to support mixing and mingling that is so important to this world, the
exterior (street) layout should create those places to meet and mingle
too. This calls for non-regularity of
the overall street pattern to increase the interest and the vibrancy of the
outdoor space, and allow for natural pause points where people might gather
organically.
Don't forget the housing.
Housing without question is a major issue. In Kendall Square, the place was originally
developed in any way it could be. One
need only look at the aerial photo of the Square in 1970 to realize the depth
of desperation landowners must have felt at the moment. But over time, and over many cycles of
economic activity the housing has begun to arrive. Tastes have changed over time.
A renaissance of urban living leads to the Live + Work + Play equation whose
importance grows.
Give it time. Any
urban plan takes years to realize. Very
little happens in short time frames, and iterations and modifications are very
important to getting it right. Fads come and go, as do economies. The willingness to roll with the punches of the ups and downs
of the market, along with the births, lives and deaths of technologies and their related industries is an important component to the long-term viability of the concept.
And perhaps the most important "hard" planning
truth --
Have an anchor tenant.
You cannot do any of this without an "idea generator"
somewhere nearby. Boston is trying to get in on this game that Cambridge is doing so well at. The big question in Boston is: without MIT right there, can
Boston replicate the Cambridge model? To be seen, with a lot riding on the
outcome.
