25 years watching Boston innovate: A warning for what’s next

After a quarter-century of covering the innovation economy in Massachusetts for this newspaper, this is my last column. As I write it, I’m thinking about three different years: 2000, 2025, and 1969. And I’m worried.

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When I started writing a column called “@large” in February 2000, Massachusetts was riding high. We’d created a wave of internet companies, including significant players like Lycos, CMGI, Akamai, and Monster.com.

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Biotechs founded in the 1980s and 1990s were starting to get their drugs onto the market, and the Whitehead Institute was taking a lead role in the Human Genome Project.

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Venture capital firms based on “Mount Money” in Waltham met with every ambitious founder trying to get a business off the ground — and funded those they judged to be most promising

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One of the startups that raised its first capital in February 2000, Tripadvisor, is today a publicly traded company worth $2 billion — after plenty of ups and downs. I’ve had the opportunity to track the rise of companies like Tripadvisor, and the fall of others. (RIP, Jibo the robot.)

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First, the density and intensity of tech in the San Francisco Bay area began to leave Boston in the dust. In areas like mobile phones, social media, cloud computing, and electronic payments, there were just so many startups and investors out west — and so many key companies setting the new standards, like Facebook, Apple, and Google — that entrepreneurs worried about being at a disadvantage if they were based anywhere else. (I often heard from readers who were tired of my explorations of why companies like Facebook and Dropbox, along with the Y Combinator entrepreneurship program, moved west.)

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But Kendall Square also emerged as the global hub for life sciences, spawning and attracting companies working on the latest technologies for creating new medicines and vaccines. At one point, the Legal Sea Foods there felt like a high school cafeteria where you ran into everyone. But instead of teachers, you had Nobel laureates and MIT professors. Instead of football players and cheerleaders, you had venture capitalists. And instead of nerds, you had the founders of biotech startups.

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And the engines of innovation here were humming. Universities were attracting smart people from around the world. Their research was serving as the seeds of new companies. Federal dollars were flowing, and they were supplemented by state incentives for industries like life sciences and clean energy. We seemed to be forging an identity as the R&D lab to the world — tackling hard problems that might require a decade or more to solve.

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For a dozen years, from 2010 to 2022, Massachusetts topped the annual list compiled by the Milken Institute, a nonprofit think tank, which ranked all 50 states on the strength of their knowledge economy. (The Milken Institute last put out its state rankings in 2022 — perhaps because our constant winning got boring.) That foundation of educational institutions and government research funding helped soften — a bit — the impact of the post-dot com era and the 2008 recession.

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Fast forward to 2025, and the second Trump administration seems intent on starving our engines of innovation of as much oxygen and fuel as it can. Funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation is being cut; Trump’s executive orders and statements have indicated that his administration won’t support the Green New Deal, electric vehicle infrastructure, or wind power. Universities that don’t dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives risk losing funding from the Department of Education (which itself is under threat).

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“I have a hard time understanding why people don’t see how damaging everything Trump is doing is — whether it’s slowing funding to research institutions or slowing down companies that want to bring talent here from other countries,” says Tom Hopcroft, a former president of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and now head of the Net Zero Institute, a trade association that focuses on helping businesses reduce their environmental impact. “There is a lot of volatility and unknowns. But I still would rather be here than in other parts of the country, given all the strengths that we have in this ecosystem.”

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Have we seen anything like the current climate before?

Not exactly, but let’s rewind to 1969. Driving through Kendall Square last month, I noticed that a demolition crew was starting to dismantle a cluster of buildings erected in the 1960s for the use of NASA.

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A huge swath of Kendall had been razed to create an electronics research center for the space agency. But shortly after the Apollo 11 moon landing, President Richard Nixon targeted the center for closure.

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An expected 2,100 NASA jobs vanished, and it took decades for the neighborhood to fully recover — even though a former Massachusetts governor who served in Nixon’s cabinet, John Volpe, helped find a new use for the NASA buildings. (Now, MIT is redeveloping the land.)

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What we’re looking at during Trump 2.0 feels reminiscent of that NASA closure. But instead of affecting one corner of Cambridge, it will be felt from Amherst to Worcester to New Bedford to Boston. And there are no representatives of Massachusetts in the Trump cabinet, no science advisers with links to MIT. (Trump’s chosen science adviser studied politics at Princeton but has no degrees in engineering or science.)

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I worry that our innovation economy, starved of fuel and oxygen for four years, is going to be like a car that will coast for a while before settling to a stop.

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And I’m not the only one worrying, of course. Jack Wilson, the former president of the University of Massachusetts, posted on LinkedIn recently that the Trump administration seems bent on “making America weak again,” noting that “one of the most important reasons that the United States became the pre-eminent economic (and military) power was the intentional investment in scientific research. Now, Shadow President Musk is determined to break the source of our economic and scientific power…”

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When I spoke with Wilson last week, he said that scientific research paid for with taxpayer money “has given us much of what we see today on the Nasdaq or Dow Jones Industrial Average.” But, he said: “What you’re seeing is a turn away from that point of view by the federal government. You have a whole raft of things that have created a negative climate for our incredible ecosystem, and our great research universities.”

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The historian Bob Krim, a friend and frequent collaborator of mine, likes to point out that Massachusetts has bounced back from at least four major economic collapses before, going back to the era of the Puritans and Governor John Winthrop. So while I’m concerned, I’m also always going to bet on our ability to solve thorny problems, cultivate new industries, find sources of funding — and make the world better and smarter every year.

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Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you around town.

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