Innovators!

I consider myself a creative person, but an innovator I am not. If I wrack my brains, the one and only innovation I can come up with is the Gus Sandwich, which I "invented" with my brother Tom (a.k.a. Gus, after the mouse in Cinderella) roughly sixty years ago. As innovations go, The Gus is pretty damned good: bacon, lettuce, cheese and pickle with mayo on pumpernickel. Sixty years back, the bread would likely have been white, the cheese American (cheddar now), but it has stood the test of time, and remains a house favorite. 

Other than that, any mildly innovative idea I have - like maybe make the sign-out button on some app or other more obvious - would be marginal at best if I were a UX designer.

But I can definitely appreciate the innovations of others  - at least some of them. 

The bite wings the dentist uses to take x-rays are a lot better than the gag-inducing ones they used to have. Sneakers have better support than those PF Flyers I laced up when I was a kid. I've grown to like keeping my calendar on line. Blogging wouldn't be possible if there wasn't an Internet...

Other innovations, I'm neutral or even negative on. Like the fact that every rental car seems to have a different way of doing everything, from starting it up to shifting gears to activating the wipers. None of these "innovations" strike me as improvements. They're just changes. And for an occasional driver like me, they're changes for the worst.

But mostly, I'm thankful for all the innovations that end up making life a little easier, a little better. 

So I was plenty pleased to learn that Massachusetts, for the second year, is in second place on Bloomberg's State Innovation Index. "We" came in second to California. Which ain't bad, considering they're a lot larger than "we" are.

The ranking is based on six equally weighted metrics: research and development intensity, productivity, clusters of companies in technology, STEM jobs, residents with degrees in science and engineering disciplines and patent activity. (Source: Boston Globe)

Massachusetts came in first in tech company density, and you don't have to hang around here for very long to figure out that this is true. Route 128 is still pretty much a tech corridor. Kendall Square in Cambridge is jam-packed with tech companies. As is the old Boston leather district. Curiously, the companies mentioned as making up the tech-company density were mostly old timers: GE, Raytheon, Thermo Fisher, Biogen... They did mention Toast, which was a VC darling - up until the pandemic croaked their business, which was a platform for restaurant management. But no mention of more recent innovators like Boston Dynamics with their robotics dog, Spot. (Actually, they've been around nearly 30 years, but Spot is a relatively young pup.)

Massachusetts has a lot of biotech, and this is coming into play in the COVID world with companies like Moderna Therapeutics, which has a new vaccine that's already in human clinical trial. (Biogen is also associated with coronavirus, as the first/worst outbreak of COVID occurred at a Biogen when the company's executive offsite turned them into a super-spreader of the virus.)

Washington ranked #3 on the list, followed by Connecticut and Oregon. The laggards are no surprise: Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi. Poor, Southern, rural, under-educated, anti-science. Someone has to come in last, and being last doesn't mean there's nothing going on there, innovation-wise. Still, I'm guessing that these rankings reflect both relative and absolute position. Hard to envision what sort of souped-up Marshall Plan it would take to drag these states into the 21st century. 

At least part of the credit for the success of Massachusetts goes to the Morrill Act, which at the outset of the Civil War helped create universities dedicated to solving practical problems by specializing in  agricultural and engineering research and education. 

The Morrill Act of 1862 helped boost higher education in America by granting states public land they could sell and then use the proceeds to establish colleges.

I had always associated the Morrill Act with the establishment of state universities, and indeed most were founded thanks to Morrill. What I did not know was that:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was among the earliest recipients of the act, which served as the basis for many other institutions, including the University of California and Washington State University.

News to me. 

Anyway, prior to Morrill pretty much the only engineering school in the US was West Point, which focused on fort building. We've come a long way with respect to innovation. At least I think we have. Get moving, all of yez, on those COVID vaccines...