This article was written with Michael Greeley, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is here in Cambridge this morning meeting with community leaders, and presumably also with his own staff to learn how things are going at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD) at One Memorial Drive.

So this would be a good moment to let him know, from the perspective of a couple of us in the local community, that his team here has done a fabulous job.

When Microsoft moved into town, it did two things in particular that have made a big impact: the first was to provide resources for a large and very capable team of people whose mission is to engage with and improve the local community. That team is made up of names and faces that have become very familiar and respected in our local tech scene: Sara Spalding, Gus Weber, Paul Coeburgh, Leah Brunson, and Brian Burke. Each of these folks has taken on significant organizational work for groups seeking to improve Massachusetts. An example is the leading role Gus has taken seeking to create better mechanisms for students to find internships at Massachusetts businesses. Sara has taken on leading roles in the Kendall Square Association and the Massachusetts IT Collaborative.

The second significant contribution Microsoft made was to create a set of community gathering spaces at NERD like none other in Kendall Square. It includes a full floor of conference center space, plus another floor with fun and unusual architecture for soirées of various sorts. They have made this space available to a broad array of outside networking groups, such as the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, which holds its dynamic Tech Tuesday events there.

Wednesday this week there were two back-to back terrific events at NERD. There was a reception preceding the MIT Enterprise Forum meeting featuring Ray Kurzweil, Bill Warner and Sim Simeonov. Our Lieutenant Governor, Tim Murray, and Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki showed up, and it was a great conversation. Following this the place transformed into party mode, as some 26 restaurants, health clubs, and others in Kendall Square hosted hundreds of “elite” reviewers from the popular online review site Yelp. The place was packed, the music got turned up, and there was an air of festivity and community rarely felt in Kendall Square in the past.

So, thank you Microsoft. You have brought something new and special to our neighborhood.

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This article was written with Geoff Mamlet.

Today, some of our legislators will hold a hearing at the State House to discuss changes in Massachusetts’ non-compete laws. They would do well to heed our own past as an open employment state.

In the mid-1780s, Samuel Slater was a young apprentice in England working for the men who created the world’s first mass production system: a system which produced thread from cotton. At the time, Britain was intent on protecting its technology, and it was illegal for British citizens to emigrate and take with them the knowledge of British technology. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater.

The American textile industry was desperate for a way to compete against the British. They offered a bounty of $100 to people willing to import British technical knowledge. “For which man will bring us English models, will be given monetary funds for his reward.”

Slater, at the end of his apprenticeship, emigrated to the US, taking with him his knowledge of the British mill technology. Arriving in Beverly, Massachusetts, Slater used his skill to build there the first cotton mill in America. He went on to produce numerous improvements to the British designs.

The innovations introduced by Slater are recognized as having kicked off the industrial revolution in America, and he became known as its father. By 1810, there were 50 mills spinning cotton into yarn or thread. By 1815, there were 140 mills within 30 miles of Providence alone, with 26,000 people on the payroll.

The freedom Slater had in Massachusetts to practice his trade, despite restrictions elsewhere, made our region the center of a technology boom that changed the world.

We would like to leave our legislators with this thought: today’s Massachusetts non-compete law does not prevent a young person from following in Slater’s footsteps. It merely encourages that young person to do so in California. Surely this is short-sighted.

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There has been a lively debate following Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog “Why Waltham Doesn’t Matter.” One of the threads is whether it matters if entrepreneurs and VCs are physically concentrated close to each other.

It should not matter where a VC’s offices are located. Good VCs and entrepreneurs will find each other. Andrew Perlman, who co-founded several local big successes, including Coatue, Sirtris, and GreatPoint Energy, in my observation is almost never in his office. He is out meeting investors and other potential collaborators wherever they may be. On any given day someone like Andrew may be found in his Cambridge office, or at a coal mine in the midwest, or in a place like Novosibirsk, Russia’s science city, where he acquired some of the core technology for Coatue.

This can be true for VCs as well. Based on how often I see Bob Metcalfe outside of his Polaris Venture Partners office, I’m not convinced he has one. Celebrated West Coast VC Vinod Khosla has had no trouble investing in young companies in the Cambridge area, such as iSkoot, Mascoma, and GreatPoint Energy.

But these are our superstars. Many of the rest of us find it hard to make connections. This is particularly true for newcomers, such as the roughly 3,000 new arrivals at MIT each year. They may be amongst the smartest people in the world, but they don’t know anybody and they often have limited social skills. How has this group of people consistently pumped out some of the world’s most important technology companies?

This is where the density of Cambridge kicks in. People working and studying in and around Kendall Square meet constantly and informally: at myriad talks at MIT where you are likely to run into a Nobel Laureate, at gatherings we can walk to after work before heading home, in the hallways of our tightly clustered buildings of powerhouses like Google, Microsoft, Akamai, Genzyme, Novartis, and Biogen Idec, at local watering holes like the Muddy Charles, and at loosely structured meetups, such as those at Bijan Sabet and Nabeel Hyatt’s OpenCoffee Club at Café Andala in Central Square. These chance meetings are where a bright kid from Israel gets urged to start a company, how a new entrepreneur first “clicks” with an investor, how an investor helps find a great CFO for that entrepreneur, and how a lawyer offers to kick in the time to get it all incorporated. Stuff happens here, and this is why Cambridge matters.

We tend to take this for granted, and we miss its importance. Anyone who has spent time in other science and technology regions, such as Cambridge (England), Shanghai, or Silicon Valley knows that those places are spread out and broken up. Key labs, companies, and universities are so far apart that getting together may mean a two-hour car drive.

How do we make the most of this unique structural advantage? There are many great role models out there. Joost Bonsen, another Xconomist, helped create MIT’s $100K business plan competition, which galvanized current students at MIT to think about startups, and created a movement which spread to many other universities. He also helped create TechLink, a group that organizes mixers between different departments at MIT, and which helped MIT become a better collaborating university at the student level. Desh Deshpande created the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, getting capital and help to individuals with exceptional nascent ideas. The British Consulate, and later and on a grander scale, Microsoft, opened beautiful meeting facilities next to MIT where networking groups were welcome to hold their events. Jeff Bussgang and his colleagues at Flybridge Capital Partners created Stay In MA, which helps students cover the costs of attending local professional conferences. Some of us are working on a project called Venture Café, which seeks to create a different type of ‘center’ in the center of Kendall Square.

Coming back to Scott’s blog post, I don’t believe it matters if you are a VC in Boston, Cambridge, or Waltham, or if you are a company, a city government, a university, or simply an individual who cares about innovation. The way to matter is to contribute to building and strengthening your community in the ways you can. Pick an initiative and run with it. If it doesn’t work, try something else. You will make a difference, and at the very least, perhaps Scott Kirsner won’t get on your case.

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On snowy days in certain neighborhoods of our great city it is not unusual for someone to put an old trash can in an on-street parking space that they have recently cleared. We all know there is threat implied: if you take the spot, you will regret it. Given the effort expended to clear the spot, the person who did all the work may feel justified in blocking others from taking it. But we all know that this tends to screw things up for everyone. Pretty soon cars circling looking for parking spaces clog the roads, and nobody can get home, even if they have blocked a spot.

This is a textbook example of the classic “tragedy of the commons” problem, in which following our personal self-interest eventually screws things up for everyone.

I believe the use of non-competes falls into the same category. By laying claim to our best employees, and keeping them from working for others, our economy becomes less agile, many of our best employees get tied up in what may not be the best job for them, and their only option is to move to a state that prohibits non-competes.

Don’t get me wrong. I use non-competes in my business, and nearly everyone else I know does, too. Non-competes are in our individual self-interest. The problem is just that they probably aren’t in our collective interest.

In states where non-competes are unenforceable, such as California, we know from our brethren there that employees rapidly gain experience, moving from company to company in quick succession. One of the results of this is that the best people quickly flock to the best companies as they start to show promise. This may be one reason that the world’s tech powerhouses like Google and Cisco disproportionately come from California.

While one could argue that banning non-competes hurts California companies individually, empirical evidence seems to suggest that the system benefits to society collectively outweigh this. In addition to the observation that the Googles and Ciscos of the world tend to grow more commonly in California, it also appears that investors are most happy to put their money there. Venture capital investment there has grown much faster there in the past decade than it has in Massachusetts, reaching a level now that is about three times that of Massachusetts.

This problem is not just theoretical. It is practical, and personal. Twice in the last few months, I have seen cases where great employees were prevented from working for the company that could make the best use of their talents. In one of these cases, the current employer was effectively out of business, although not yet legally dissolved, and for reportedly emotional reasons suggested it would litigate if the employee in question moved to a healthier company in the same industry. This scared off the new employer, who simply didn’t want the legal risk. The employee had to switch industries to take a new job.

Years ago, one of our executives left my employ at Cambridge Innovation Center. I was somewhat concerned that he would help others compete with us, and I reminded him of his non-compete. Not long after, I learned he had moved to California. While this may have benefitted my firm, it was clearly not good for Massachusetts.

I believe movement from company to company is a form of innovation pollination, and we should encourage it. It is time for our lawmakers to ban non-competes.

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Old places can accomplish new things.

Boston and Tokyo are both about 400 years old. Yet we’re different when it comes to planning for the future. Not long ago, Tokyo finished building a new island in its harbor, and a new city on that island, complete with a subway system that runs without human intervention. The goal? Explore what its future might look like by building “a showcase for future living.”

Closer to home, Toronto recognized a few years ago that it was losing ground in the sciences, so it deleted two-square kilometers of its downtown and replaced it with the Mars Discovery District, a vast collection of intertwined university research facilities, commercial research space, and the best biotech incubator space I’ve ever seen—and I’m an incubator guy.

Tokyo and Toronto prove it’s possible for places to set ambitious goals and achieve them.

Recently, at the Nantucket Conference, I interviewed a successful Boston-area CEO who reminded me that smart organizations think long-term. With sales of over $500M, Robert Keane’s 15-year-old Vistaprint dominates its sector. Yet he remarked, “We are a young company. This is the beginning of the Vistaprint story. Our management’s perspective is decades, not years.”

Greater Boston should take a page from Tokyo, Toronto, and business leaders like Robert Keane, and dedicate energy to thinking long term and thinking big.

Let’s not kid ourselves: we haven’t been doing this lately. Other than putting a car tunnel underground and creating a ‘subway line’ that looks suspiciously like a bus service, I can’t think of much we’ve done in the past 20 years that one could fairly describe as BIG.

Visions for our future in the Boston area will not be handed to us on a platter by President Obama, or anybody else. We need to craft them ourselves. It is time we began a dialogue about what we would like to accomplish together. I invite Xconomy readers to share here their personal grand visions for our future. What should we set our sights on?

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