Luke Timmerman explains why Boston is poised to overtake the Bay Area as the biotech hub of the universe - and his reasons sound a lot like the reasons why the Bay Area overtook the Boston area as the high-tech center of the world:
Success begets success and companies and innovators are drawn here by the unique concentration of companies and innovators already here - and now we've got a unique concentration of start-ups, established Big Pharma, research hospitals, Harvard and MIT. Also, everybody's piled on top of each other, especially in Kendall Square, thanks to smart zoning decisions, which is what you want in a collaborative, cross-pollinating kind of field like biotech. Plus, the Bay Area's now become too expensive for start-ups and people just getting out of college (sound familiar?). Also:
People on the West Coast sometimes like to trot out stereotypes about the sharp-elbowed competitors in Boston, how they just can't collaborate as well as us laid-back West Coasters. That's just not consistent with the Boston I've experienced. If anything, there's more of a tight-knit collaborative community in Boston than in San Francisco. There's a can-do spirit, an energy in Boston that is palpable. It will endure. Boston is reaping what it has sown for decades.
