Growing Innovative Companies to Scale: How Does Massachusetts Measure Up? is a report of the MIT Industrial Performance Center that has been released with the sponsorship of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership. The report brings together for the first time a critical mass of observations, data, and analysis to addresses the critical issue of how innovative companies scale up their businesses and assesses how the Massachusetts economy compares in this dimension of performance with other regions of the country.
Through this work, the research aligns closely with the goals of the Mass Scale Initiative, an industry-led effort supported by the Innovation Institute at MassTech, which connects the CEOs of scaled and scaling tech firms to discuss opportunities and challenges for growing companies and improving the conditions and culture for doing so successfully here in Massachusetts.
The IPC report emphasizes the critical role played by companies of scale in the regional economy, through their generation of jobs, wealth, management talent, future entrepreneurs and role models, cluster specialization, acquisition capabilities and ability to directly and indirectly support startup formation. The researched analyzed the performance of four industry focus sectors (advanced manufacturing; life sciences; computer-related; and software and Internet services) in the MSAs of Boston, San Francisco/Silicon Valley and New York comparing firm populations at various stages of development – including venture-capital-backed startups and later-stage public companies – over a 24-year period (from 1990 to 2014). The four key industry sectors studied account for 90 percent of all Massachusetts startups that have received financial backing from venture capital firms in recent decades.
The report was carried out over an 18-month period by a team of MIT faculty, research staff and students based at the IPC and formally released on December 10, 2015 at MIT.
