MODELS OF SUCCESS Region Needs to Tap Potential
BYLINE: JO-ANN MORIARTY, STAFF
This is the first of a two-part series on the development of technology-based businesses and the challenges they face in Western Massachusetts.
Business leaders who have succeeded locally say that the region needs to develop a shared vision and a strategic plan.
While Greater Boston skates along smartly on its knowledge-based economy, Western Massachusetts, burdened with poverty, undereducation and state neglect, is still fumbling to find its footing.
In every direction, there are glints of possibility and competitive strengths - ample space, lower housing and labor costs, proximity, superior quality of life, the expanding economic influence of Baystate Health and MassMutual, the region's economic engines, and the enormous but mostly untapped potential of the University of Massachusetts. All could help provide the infrastructure for a sound future.
In patches, here and there, are promising models of success.
Blackstone Medical, founded by the three sons of a Springfield machinist, trots in the global economy with precision work, making titanium spine replacements and surgical instruments that are so stunning they are said to look like pieces of art.
At Court Square Data, also headquartered in Springfield, Palmer native Keith M. Parent employs about 100 people with offices in Connecticut and New Jersey. Together, they create savvy software that scientists can use for research and development.
In Holyoke, Marox creates surgical instruments and screws, and Universal Plastics uses high-density plastic to manufacture products like canoes.
Success can seem so near, but still fleeting, as the region struggles to achieve the mix of investment and attention it needs to advance economically.
"What is missing, to bridge the gap of what is needed in Springfield and Holyoke, is public investment," said Holyoke Mayor Michael J. Sullivan. "Boston has been heavily subsidized."
Between 1960 and 2000, Springfield and Holyoke each lost nearly seven out of 10 manufacturing jobs that once provided the working class with stability. According to the Census Bureau, Western Massachusetts and the state as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2004 and would have lost a lot more had it not been for an influx of new immigrants.
For Springfield and Holyoke, there is much about the landscape that appears very bleak.
These cities are struggling with poverty, job loss, troubled schools, and, in the case of Springfield, the taint of corruption.
Western Massachusetts has always suffered from the distance - literal and figurative - from the seat of power in Boston, and, now, the economic branding that has made the Boston-Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology area the center of technology enterprise.
Finally, state officials, beginning with Gov. Deval L. Patrick, have begun chanting the mantra of Holyoke, Springfield and Pittsfield. They seem to realize the need to rescue these cities.
But to Agawam businessman Steven G. Richter, whose test laboratory has made him one of those shimmering islands of success, it is ultimately up to Western Massachusetts to right and rescue itself.
"Everyone is counting on Boston people to help us out," said Richter, of Microtest Laboratories in Agawam, where he owns four buildings and employs nearly 100 people who manufacture cancer therapy drugs.
"That is not going to happen. Boston people take care of their own," he said, "There is a wall at Worcester."
Richter, 51, is a home-grown success story. Born in Springfield, he went to Holyoke Community College, graduated from the University of Massachusetts and earned a doctorate while he held jobs, bought used textbooks, ate countless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and some nights slept in his car.
Beginning in 1984, he began buying up buildings for manufacturing space.
Richter is plugged into the region's technology and development networking and serves on the board of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. Two things would make him happy.
He wants the region to come up with a focused vision for its future. And he wants UMass to have a physical presence in Springfield or Holyoke that would create jobs. He wants a partnership between industry and academia.
The new $92 million integrated life science research center UMass is building on its Amherst campus will advance research and development and produce intellectual property, but it will not be a job-generating source, Richter said.
"UMass should be a focal point," he said, "and one of the things Springfield needs to address with the state money is how to develop a partnership with UMass on a scale for economic development. It is a tough question."
Richter acknowledged that UMass has a partnership with Baystate Medical Center in developing life science and that the Pioneer Valley Life Science Institute is a physical product of that coupling. But he wants what UMass gave Fall River, an advanced technology manufacturing center where researchers work in special labs with local business leaders to develop new technology for manufacturing and product development.
Jack M. Wilson, the university's president, said there are networks in place for partnerships between policy-makers, public officials and business leaders to discern the reasons for the state's economic split.
"It is a very complicated issue that developed over many years," Wilson said. "Simplistic approaches are not going to get us to where we want to go."
One partnership, Wilson said, is the "East-Meets-West" initiative that he worked on with U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, to bring together Boston business leaders with those from Western Massachusetts. He said that the university also has numerous initiatives to advance technology in the region's economy.
"It is a problem that has developed over a century, and we are not going to solve it with somebody coming up with a great idea. We are going to solve it with a lot of hard work over decades.
"I don't think an anecdote is the way to plan economic development," Wilson said. "We have to work on strong partnerships through research and really understanding what is needed and connecting people and crafting infrastructure to support what that plan is."
He added that if the region's economy can be boosted by the university having a strong physical presence, "we will have a physical presence."
"We need it. We all know that," said Ellen Bemben, the president of the Springfield-based Regional Technology Corps.
She comes from a manufacturing background in plastics, and her job at the corps is connecting the dots of the individual efforts of business leaders, developers, public officials and planners to map a more successful future.
"We have to figure out the focus," Bemben said. "We are so close, we have people paying attention to us and it is for real."
"There is a very intentional relationship that has been built in the last two years between UMass at Amherst and the private sector. The demand and the expectation on the university are heavier than ever," Bemben said.
"UMass-Amherst is charged with research and development. There are individual, thriving relationships between scientists and the private sector, and the university is trying to improve on accessibility by putting formal programs into place to streamline the system of moving (intellectual property) from their shelves into the private sector," she said.
Robert L. Culver, president and chief executive officer of MassDevelopment, a quasi-public agency providing tax-exempt financing for economic development, speculated that a regional focus would help bring public investment to the Pioneer Valley, which he said "is at a turning point."
"It is a very good place to think about biotech and high-tech related jobs," Culver said, "It can draw people out of New York City up to the Pioneer Valley."
He described Springfield - to which he shepherded $110 million since 2000 - and Holyoke - where his agency has invested $55 million - as having good bones on which to build a future for generations of city dwellers.
Like Bemben and Richter, he said the region needs a shared vision.
"The plan is what is really critical," Culver said. "The Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires are ready and capable for substantial change for the better."
Simply put, a plan would focus and harness the energy of those working on behalf of Western Massachusetts into a disciplined strategy forward.
The time, as Bemben said, may be right.
The four counties have the ear of Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Murray, who said that as the mayor of Worcester he was frustrated at the amount of money thrown into Boston's economy "without the blink of an eye."
"That is shortsighted and we need to be strategic," Murray said.
To Richter, it isn't a dizzying task.
What does Western Massachusetts have that Cambridge doesn't, he asks?
He sees land and livestock and, for example, great opportunities in animal pharmacology. People spend $2 billion a year on drugs for their pets.
"The only way to break down that wall is to show we can function just fine by ourselves by doing something that we do better than anybody else in the world," Richter said.
(PHOTO 2) Jack M. Wilson