With the emphasis many state and local tech-based economic development organizations have placed on biotechnology over the past 12-18 months, few are far enough along in implementing their strategies to point to more than a handful of successes or new construction projects. The recent explosion in public investment of resources and policies toward developing local biotech capacity is largely based on the promise of anticipated economic gains in the near or not-so-near future.
Independent analysis of the long-term impact of specific state and local tech-based economic development policies are rare. Some programs launched in the 1980s that have commissioned outside impact studies, such as the Edison Technology Centers, the Ben Franklin Technology Partnership and Utah’s Centers of Excellence, have discovered strong returns for the public’s investment. (See the 12/20/96, 10/22/99, and 1/28/00 issues of SSTI’s Weekly Digest in our web archives for these stories.)
Reviews of localized impacts of state tech-based economic development policy are even rarer, which makes a recent study by Eric T. Nakajima and Robert W. Smith, two graduate students in City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, so unique. The two sought to determine if any cause and effect could be discerned between a state’s economic development policy and industrial growth. They used Worcester, Massachusetts, for their case study partly because of its isolation from metropolitan Boston and the Route 128 phenomenon.
After several months of interviews and analysis, Nakajima and Smith concluded that today's vibrant biotechnology industry in Worcester is largely attributable to state economic development policies in place during the administration of Gov. Michael Dukakis (1983-1991).
Several specific initiatives are identified in their report for creating the climate to nourish the community’s current biotech concentration: