Politics play a significant role in Massachusetts’s 10-year plan to invest $1 billion into its life sciences sector. Gov. Deval Patrick championed the effort, which aims to grow the life sciences sector in the state and create new jobs. And every year the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the quasi-public agency in charge of the initiative, seeks support from politicians on Beacon Hill to approve part of its annual budget.

In the second part of my interview with Susan Windham-Bannister, the chief executive of the Life Sciences Center, we focused on the role of politics in the state’s $1 billion plan. (Here’s the first part of the interview that focused on topics related to Genzyme, Biogen Idec, Carl Icahn, and a two-year status update on the initiative itself). There have been major political changes in the Bay State since the $1 billion plan was signed into law in June 2008.

To name a couple of those changes, Gov. Patrick is now in a close race in his bid for reelection with Republican candidate Charlie Baker, the former chief of the Boston-based health insurer Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (read on in the Q&A below for Windham-Bannister’s comments on Baker’s healthcare background). Also, Scott Brown, who won the late Ted Kennedy’s former seat in the U.S. Senate in January, voted against the bill that created the $1 billion initiative back in June 2008 when he was still a state senator.

What do these political changes mean for the state’s $1 billion life sciences plan? Windham-Bannister recently tackled my questions on this topic in addition to others related to politics. For example, I’ve been wondering how, with the majority of industry and academic activity clustered within and east of the Route 128 corridor, the Life Sciences Center has managed to distribute its funding elsewhere in the state. Also, I got her take on what the life sciences community lost with the death of Sen. Kennedy, who was the industry’s go-to man on Capitol Hill to help bring federal research funding to the state.

It’s also worth mentioning that Windham-Bannister herself has close ties to the Patrick administration. While she says she won’t endorse any of the gubernatorial candidates in her official role as head of the Life Sciences Center, she acknowledges that as a private citizen she’s giving her time and financial support to … Next Page »

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[Updated, see page 2] San Francisco-based Zynga, continuing the acquisition spree enabled by the massive success of its social games for Facebook, MySpace, and the Apple iPhone, has acquired Conduit Labs, the three-year-old music gaming company based in Cambridge, MA.

Zynga announced the acquisition in a press release. Conduit, headquartered in the Barron Building at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, will now be known as “Zynga Boston” and its team will be “immediately integrated into Zynga’s workforce,” according to the announcement. Zynga isn’t saying how much it paid for the startup.

Conduit Labs was formed in 2007 by Nabeel Hyatt, formerly chief operating officer at MIT spinoff Ambient Devices. Backed by $8.5 million in venture financing from Charles River Ventures in Waltham, MA, and Prism VentureWorks of Westwood, MA, the startup first gained notoriety for Loudcrowd, a casual gaming community launched to the public in March 2009. In Loudcrowd, players created customized avatars and competed for points in animated dance games requiring a combination of listening skills and eye-hand coordination.

Loudcrowd demonstrated Conduit’s programming chops, and even attracted the attention of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who played a few rounds during a visit to Conduit’s original Cambridge Innovation Center home. But the game predated the huge boom in social games facilitated by Facebook’s growth, and failed to gain a large user base. Conduit shut down Loudcrowd on July 29 of this year to focus on its two Facebook game titles, Music Pets and Super Dance (the latter of which drew heavily on art styles and game play developed for Loudcrowd).

Now those two titles will become part of Zynga’s existing Facebook lineup, which includes the breakout hits FarmVille and Mafia Wars as well as a number of lesser-known titles, such as Cafe World, Fashion Wars, FishVille, FrontierVille, PetVille, Pirates, Special Forces, Treasure Isle, Vampire Wars, and YoVille.

In a March 2009 interview with Xconomy, Conduit’s Hyatt said that Loudcrowd, which was designed in part as a vehicle for music promotion and sales, represented “10 percent or less” of the potential for the company’s social games. “It became very obvious very early on that the potential for this product was that it was a multi-billion-dollar company, if we executed it right,” Hyatt said. He compared Loudcrowd to MTV, which, he said, “had a worse path to market and a worse monetization model than we have. This thing is ours to screw up.”

But as it became clear that Facebook, with its built-in viral user acquisition mechanism, would be a better platform for social games than the open Web, Conduit pivoted. Its Facebook games have done fairly well—Super Dance has 483,000 monthly active users, and Music Pets has 362,000. But the startup never approached the levels of success achieved by … Next Page »

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It’s been more than two years since Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the bill for the state’s plan to invest $1 billion in its life sciences sector over a 10-year period. Susan Windham-Bannister, who started work as chief executive of the quasi-public Massachusetts Life Sciences Center around the time the bill was signed, has since been in charge of the massive initiative.

To get a read on how things are going at the Life Sciences Center, and to hear Windham-Bannister’s take on major developments at Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ) and other nooks of the state’s life sciences sector, I wandered around the Waltham, MA office park where she and center are based until two maintenance guys pointed me in the right direction. (It was a good thing, as I almost dropped in on my friends at the venture firm Advanced Technology Ventures in the same building to ask for directions. If you wonder why “Dr. Sue” set up shop here, read this piece from our Xconomy archives.)

So far, the $1 billion plan appears to be moving along nicely despite some cuts to its annual budget for its investment fund on Beacon Hill. In the program’s first two years, a total of $191 million dollars has been awarded through several programs to support the life sciences sector in the state. Those dollars have been invested alongside $710 million from companies, the National Institutes of Health, private investors, and other sources of external funding. Noting the impact of those dollars and her center’s, Windham-Bannister likes to say that her organization has already come close to reaching its magic number of $1 billion in investments in life sciences.

In pure state funding, the center has distributed the majority of its dollars to capital projects in the life sciences sector. For example, the town of Framingham got a $12.9 million grant from the center to for work on a wastewater facility, which is needed to support Genzyme’s $300 million project to build a new biotech drug plant there. The company also got $6 million in tax incentives last year to create 200 jobs in Framingham during 2010.

The center is also courting global life sciences companies to match its investments in startups. To date, the French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE:SNY) and New Jersey-based health products powerhouse Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) have each agreed to contribute at least … Next Page »

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Governor Deval Patrick had good intentions of wanting to grow the cleantech space when Ian Bowles consolidated all of the available money the state had slated for solar initiatives into a new group called the Clean Energy Center (CEC). This group essentially places bets on which startups will make it big and then provides them with grant money.

Why is it unlikely for this model to be successful? Venture capitalists hire the best and brightest to do serious due diligence on a startup prior to investing, and most of these startups fail. This formula has worked for VCs because the 20 percent of their portfolio companies that do make it, make it big enough for the VC to be successful. The same formula does not work for governments. It is unreasonable to think that the civil servants at CEC have the ability to make an impact through placing the right bets when VCs do it much better and still fail. There is a better solution for the Governor to make a real impact without placing bets.

Having seen many so many brilliant students from MIT, Harvard, BU, Olin College, and Northeastern come up with equally brilliant technology ideas, it is frustrating to see them faced with the following choices as they graduate:

1. Take a job with an established company (most likely outside the state), or

2. Continue to work on their technologies to prove out the concept in a lab/work shop.

The solution is for the State to be a facilitator for these potentially significant technologies by setting up a shared incubator space in the heart of these universities, where these engineers of the future can physically build their prototypes and go on to get funded for the right reasons. I actually asked Bob Healy, the Cambridge City Manager, if he would be able to find an empty basement near MIT to pull this off, and he was very much open to the idea. The model could follow what Tim Rowe’s Cambridge Innovation Center has done for office space. This way, engineers can access the necessary heavy tools and equipment to complete their prototypes where they would meet other brilliant engineers trying to do the same. It would create a powerful ecosystem of brilliant engineers.

Knowing that politicians need to show their worth within the four-year election cycle, is it possible for government to pull this off? Well, I say it’s worth the lobbying effort. We can follow the successful model of Jim Newton of TechShop in Menlo Park, CA. TechShop has become a de facto incubator for an astounding array of startups there. Cash-strapped inventors have used the shop’s lathes, laser cutters, welding equipment, 3-D printers, and shop tools to make prototypes.

Engineers with passion about their technologies only need a space to work out of and a bit of food to keep them going. Combining space from Bob Healy, donated tools from the private sector, and some pizza from Governor Patrick might just be the realistic key to fostering new jobs of the future in Massachusetts.

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In a joint press conference today with Governor Deval Patrick at the Massachusetts State House, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said his department has approved a scaled-down version of the long-delayed Cape Wind project at Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. Salazar said that the revised project approved by the department will consist of 130 wind turbines rather than 170, that the turbines will be moved farther away from Nantucket Island than originally proposed, and that additional seabed surveys will be conducted before construction to ensure that any as-yet-undiscovered submerged archaeological resources are protected. Some of the changes were made specifically to reduce the visual impact of the wind farm from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport; deceased Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy was a longtime opponent of the project. The wind farm, first proposed in 2001 by private developer Cape Wind Associates, is expected to supply enough power for Nantucket Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and much of Cape Cod and create several hundred construction jobs. “This will be the first of many projects up and down the Atlantic coast,” Salazar said at the press conference.

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The Patrick Administration announced today that representatives of the Massachusetts: It’s All Here campaign to support business growth in the state will be available for meetings with college students, entrepreneurs, and small business executives at their new location in the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, Cambridge. Officials who will be available by appointment for office hours at the CIC include Gregory Bialecki, Secretary of Housing and Economic Development; Eric Nakajima, Senior Innovation Policy Advisor; Anne Struthers, Executive Director of Business Development; and Kofi Jones, coordinator of Massachusetts: It’s All Here. Xconomy broke the news about the opening of the state’s CIC outpost in early February.

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MassChallenge, a Boston-area nonprofit focused on encouraging innovation, is “convinced that entrepreneurship is the answer” for everything to unemployment to the housing crisis to pollution, in the words of CEO and co-founder John Harthorne.

To put its money where its mouth is, the organization is unleashing a global startup competition with $1 million available in award money. MassChallenge officially launched the contest Wednesday to a standing room-only crowd at the new Fan Pier building on Boston’s waterfront, which will also be the organization’s future home.

From now until June 11, early stage startups from around the world can register for the contest online. Immediately they’ll get access to online training, discounts on services, and access to a network of companies in similar positions. The organization will select 300 semi-finalists for in-person pitches in July.

Up to 100 finalist businesses will actually have the opportunity to move into MassChallenge’s new office space in Boston’s seaport area, which has been designated an “innovation district” by Mayor Thomas Menino’s office. There, they’ll pair up with mentors, get strategic advice from industry experts, and link with members of the Massachusetts support system for entrepreneurs, including investors. At the inaugural competition’s conclusion in October, as many as 20 winning companies will receive $50,000—no strings attached (meaning that MassChallenge won’t require an equity stake in the companies, as many venture incubators do).

“MassChallenge is a celebration of these risk-takers,” Harthorne says.

The competition is drawing some pretty fresh entrepreneurs, including three senior students from Worcester, MA-based Clark University whom I chatted with at the launch event. They’re taking advantage of MassChallenge to turn their class project—a company called Delish Nutrish that makes allergen-free food products—into a business reality.

“We really want this to get somewhere. We don’t want it to just be a year-long project,” says co-founder Eva Fang. Another co-founder noted that MassChallenge will be particularly helpful in getting the students the contacts they lack as young entrepreneurs.

State and local officials lauded the MassChallenge organizers’ goals of promoting job creation and economic recovery in Massachusetts. “Our economy here in the Commonwealth has always been about what’s next,” said Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

Mayor Menino, who also spoke at the launch, repeatedly exuded pride over MassChallenge’s impending relocation to Boston. (The organization previously had office space in Kendall Square’s Cambridge Innovation Center, but will move in July to the Fan Pier space—which oddly enough currently resembles the CIC’s unfinished expanded space). “Where else can you find such intellectual firepower and such a strong network of supportive services?” Menino asked.

The competition’s reach will go beyond the companies directly involved in it, says Brian Burke, the northeast director for state government affairs at Microsoft, a top-level sponsor for the competition. In increasing its presence in Massachusetts, Microsoft also sought to invest in other startup efforts and further fuel the innovation economy, Burke says. “The Challenge is a core part of our DNA,” he says of the startup competition.

I caught up with one attendee who says his business will benefit from the influx of startups that MassChallenge will encourage. “MassChallenge is doing a great job promoting entrepreneurship from a business standpoint; we’re trying to do it from a legal standpoint,” says Benjamin Hron, a co-founder of two-person firm VC Ready Law Group, which seeks to provide cost-effective legal services to startups.

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The state of Massachusetts has contracted with Boston-based EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC) to employ its energy-tracking software systems to monitor 17 million square feet of state-owned facilities, using federal stimulus dollars set aside for energy investments, Governor Deval Patrick’s office announced today. The state has put $10 million toward what it calls the Enterprise Energy Management System project, which would use EnerNOC’s technology in its initial three-year phase to track real-time energy usage and target inefficiencies in 470 state buildings. The project is expected to add about 46 jobs in the state starting next month, and could save more than $10 million annually in energy costs once a planned second phase of the project is complete, the governor’s office said.

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced today that the state will provide up to $25 million to further construction of the Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a project designed to advance green computing and boost business in western Massachusetts. Patrick also designated the Holyoke area as an innovation district, and said that the computing center, which will foster research in life sciences, energy, and green computing, will get another $40 million from a consortium of universities.

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Massachusetts is going to be the focus of the health IT universe late next month — if it isn’t already. Governor Deval Patrick and his staff have invited power players in both the healthcare and technology fields to Boston in April for a conference that is expected to highlight the state’s fast-growing health IT sector.

The conclave comes as state organizations in Massachusetts and other parts of the U.S. begin spending more than $1 billon awarded to them by the federal government since February for regional and statewide systems for sharing electronic health records. To headline the conference, the governor has attracted at least two of the top federal officials involved in national health IT initiatives: Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology. The conference is slated for April 29-30 at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel in South Boston.

Several factors are playing into Patrick’s strategy for bringing these and other heavy hitters to the state, according to people involved with the conference. Massachusetts has a huge stake in President Obama’s plan to invest $19.5 billion from the federal economic stimulus passed last year to drive adoption of health information technology over the next several years; a bright spot in the mostly stormy economy in recent years has been the growth of tech companies such as Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, and Meditech that provide software and services to hospitals and other healthcare organizations. These Bay State firms are competing with companies around the world for their share of the billions of dollars in new business that will be generated by Obama’s health IT initiative, which is expected to create jobs while reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care.

Bay State officials have invited state health IT and Medicaid leaders from around the country, as well as healthcare software firms from Massachusetts, to the conference. To help ensure their participation at the conference, the plan is to pay for the travel expenses of … Next Page »

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Here in Massachusetts, we’re very good at collecting data. This is the state that gave birth to the spreadsheet, after all. But when it comes to launching coordinated action to solve the problems confronting one of the state’s biggest industries, we’re a bit slower.

Back in February, the administration of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick pulled together a group of industry, university, and government leaders to think about ways to make the state’s information technology sector more competitive. Participants in the group, which became known as the “IT Collaborative,” floated dozens of ideas (and we collected some of them here). But the Collaborative’s only concrete action was to spend $150,000 on a study to measure the IT industry’s contributions to the state’s economy.

That study is now complete, and Michael Goodman, the chairman of the Public Policy department at UMass Dartmouth, presented its findings yesterday at a public meeting attended by the governor and some 200 industry insiders. Not surprisingly, the study found that the IT industry has an enormous influence on economic activity in the state. The 10,000-plus IT companies doing business in Massachusetts spend $65 billion a year—equivalent to about 18 percent of the state’s GDP—and are responsible for another $29 billion in spending by local suppliers and contractors and $19 billion in consumer spending by employees, Goodman found.

The study did produce a few surprises: it turns out businesses aren’t too troubled by issues like long commute times in Massachusetts or the generally dismal condition of the state’s roads, bridges, and rail lines, for example. It also gathered further data confirming some long-term trends, such as the decline of the computer hardware and networking communications subsectors and the countervailing rise of software companies and IT services businesses.

But overall, there was little in the UMass study (downloadable here) to shock any IT executive, hardware or software engineer, or entrepreneur who has spent a few years doing business in Massachusetts. And in a Q&A session after his presentation, Goodman refused to be drawn out on the policy implications of the study. The farthest he would go was to point to survey respondents’ three biggest wish-list items: reduced business costs, expanded broadband connectivity, and a workforce with better training in engineering, math, and science.

At least two of those items—ensuring broader access to the Internet, and improving secondary and post-secondary education for tomorrow’s workers—are goals shared by virtually every economic development agency in the country. Achieving them would benefit all business sectors, not just the software, hardware, networking, and IT services firms that Goodman surveyed. And the third goal—making it cheaper to do business in Massachusetts, whether through lower employment taxes, simplified regulations, or more grants, loans, tax breaks, and other handouts—is also one that practically every local enterprise would endorse.

In its quest to gather more data, then, it would seem that the IT Collaborative has so far failed to take on issues and challenges that are more specific to the information technology industry—problems fine-grained enough that a) people at information technology firms could offer knowledgeable advice and solutions, and b) doing something about them might have a distinguishable impact.

At the June meeting of the IT Collaborative—which Governor Patrick also attended—Verizon regional president Donna Cupelo made a revealing remark. “Data by itself is useless,” she said. “How do we take further steps—that’s what today is about. It’s so important to take the research findings and make it meaningful, something we can use as a vital tool going forward.” The same thing could still be said six months later.

In new comments at yesterday’s event, held at the offices of Communispace in Watertown, MA, Cupelo said that … Next Page »

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed legislation this week that gives the Renewable Energy Trust, formerly a unit of the quasi-public Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a new home: the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. The Renewable Energy Trust—an investment fund that comes from surcharge on Massachusetts electrical consumers of about $6 per ratepayer per year—supports a range of alternative energy projects, while the Clean Energy Center, the energy sector’s complement to the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, is charged with supporting R&D, entrepreneurship, and workforce training in the cleantech industries. The bill that created the center in 2008 specified that it would be funded in party by reallocating Renewable Energy Trust revenues, as Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs explained in an interview with Xconomy this week. “This legislation merges the work of two quasi-public state entities with complementary missions, consolidating staff and resources while establishing the Clean Energy Center as the primary agency responsible for growing the Massachusetts clean energy industry,” Governor Patrick said in a statement released today.

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In a state that prides itself on leadership in tomorrow’s energy technologies, Ian Bowles is the point man. He’s Secretary of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, a new position created under Gov. Deval Patrick to oversee a hodgepodge of state agencies controlling everything from utility regulation to agriculture to the state’s parks and conservation lands. He’s a seemingly ubiquitous presence at energy-related events and forums around the state, frequently speaking on regulatory reform, energy efficiency, and programs to expand the use of wind and solar power. Those are issues close to the hearts of our readers in the cleantech sector—so when Bowles invited me to his office for an interview earlier this month, I jumped at the chance.

Bowles has a long history in politics and environmentalism. The Harvard grad started out as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, and ran (unsuccessfully) for the Democratic nomination in Massachusetts’ 10th Congressional District in 1996. During the final three years of the Clinton Administration, he was senior director of environmental affairs for the National Security Council, and went on to direct policy research at Conservation International, a non-profit dedicated to biodiversity protection. His last gig before becoming Massachusetts’ top energy and environmental official was as president and CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based think tank dedicated to advancing middle-class prosperity and civic life, and publisher of CommonWealth, MassINC’s house magazine.

Most of my questions for Bowles focused on a different kind of environment—the environment for clean-energy entrepreneurs in Massachusetts. While there’s obviously plenty of energy innovation in the Bay State, it’s not necessarily the easiest place to translate that innovation into real change, given the mish-mash of regulatory and legal hurdles facing startups with dreams of building pilot facilities. As Bowles himself pointed out during our interview, for example, three of the largest wind-farm facilities proposed for the state have all been snarled in litigation for years.

So I wanted to know what the Patrick Administration and the state legislature have been doing to try to smooth the way for innovators. (Quite a bit, actually, beginning with basic changes in utility regulations affecting the way the state’s electric and gas companies earn revenue and the incentives they have to invest in new technologies.) I also asked him about the heat the administration has been taking lately over perceptions that the state is losing solar manufacturing jobs to China and biofuels and battery manufacturing jobs to facilities in Michigan.

Speaking of batteries, my laptop battery died moments before my interview with Bowles ended, so I wasn’t able to record his response to my last question, which was about why budding energy entrepreneurs should consider building their companies in Massachusetts. But his answer was a distillation of the themes that ran through the interview: No matter what its downsides (e.g. litigiousness, zoning restrictions, foot-dragging utilities) the Boston area still has one of the world’s highest concentrations of great universities, especially MIT, churning out talented and ambitious young engineers; venture investors who understand the energy and cleantech industries; an innovation-friendly governor and state bureaucracy; and generally progressive regulatory policies when it comes to building markets for alternative energy sources.

Here’s an edited version of the parts of the interview that I was able to capture.

Xconomy: At a high level, how would you describe the biggest changes that you’ve been trying to push through in the way the energy business works in the state?

Ian Bowles: One of the big differences between energy and IT or life sciences is that energy is such a heavily regulated part of our economy. Much of the regulation is at the state level. Federal regulation is pretty limited, but you have 50 state public utility commissions and departments of environmental protection. What we’ve been trying to do is clear away some of the barriers and make the entire system work better, with the goals of bringing new clean energy technologies to market, creating bigger markets for existing technologies, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and … Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected---8:30 pm ET on 11/05/09]Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) said it will move its solar panel production from Massachusetts to China—dealing a blow to the clean technology economy in the commonwealth.

Evergreen plans to begin migrating the manufacturing of solar panels out of its Devens, MA, plant to a facility under construction in Wuhan, China, in mid-2010, the company announced in an earnings statement on Wednesday. A lull in demand for solar cells globally and other factors have caused the price of solar panels like the ones that Evergreen makes to plunge by more than 30 percent since mid-2008, when its Devens production facility opened, the firm said. However, the company said it does plan to continue producing its silicon wafers and cells in Devens. It will also produce the silicon wafers in China beginning next year.

An Evergreen spokesman was not immediately available for comment this afternoon, and it was unclear how relocating panel production would impact its work force in Massachusetts.

Manufacturing in China is intended to reduce overall production costs, and Evergreen said it is receiving a $33 million loan from Chinese government to help cover the expenses of moving into a new plant that the company will lease from a contract manufacturing firm called Jiawei Solar. Evergreen’s move may sting some Massachusetts politicians and taxpayers; the state committed $23 million in grants to the firm, behind considerable support from Gov. Deval Patrick and his administration, to support its manufacturing in Devens. And Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement about two years ago when construction of the Devens plant began that “we are breaking ground not only on a factory, but on the commonwealth’s clean energy future.”

Evergreen said it will manufacture its “String Ribbon” wafers at the facility it is building and will own in China, and that the wafers will then be sent to the the plant that its partner Jiawei Solar is building to convert the wafers into solar cells, which are used to make solar panels. The worldwide solar panel market has taken a beating over the past year or so due to reduced government spending or subsidies for the products in Spain and Germany, both of which are big solar panel users, as well as lower-than-projected demand in other countries such as the U.S., according to a recent report by Lux Research, which has an office in Boston. [Editor's note: the above paragraph was corrected to say that Evergreen, not its Chinese manufacturing partner, will build and own the facility where its silicon wafers will be produced in China. There are also added details from the company about the overall production process.]

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It seems like every few days since Labor Day weekend we at Xconomy get invited to attend or cover an entrepreneurship competition. This is a good thing. It means there are more and more opportunities for innovators in New England to gain exposure to the business community and investors—as well as a chance to win some cash and other prizes to help get their ventures off to a strong start.

Indeed, many startups in the Boston area have cut their teeth in the business plan competition circuit before raising rounds of venture capital or achieving other milestones. Take some of the past winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition: Cambridge, MA-based video game developer Harmonix Music Systems, creator of the hugely popular Guitar Hero franchise, and the dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, which was acquired by 3M for $95 million three years ago. And Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign, which won both the $200K MIT Clean Energy Prize and $100K Ignite Clean Energy competition last year, recently learned that it has been tentatively awarded $8.3 million from the U.S. government to advance development of its next-generation design for wind turbines.

There will no doubt be many more successful startups to emerge from entrepreneurship contests in the region in the years ahead. Some of these contests have been around for years. Others are brand new. But even for those that have been around for a while, schedules and prizes can change from year to year. So we thought it would be a good idea to round them up in one place with the latest information about them we could find.

So whether you’re an investor interested in new companies or an innovator searching for opportunities to transform your ideas or inventions into a startup, here is a list—not a ranking—of entrepreneurship competitions in New England that cater to ideas for businesses in the life sciences, clean-tech, and IT sectors. (Please note that the information came from the contest websites or organizers, and in all but one case I didn’t separate cash from in-kind services factored into the value of each prize):

—Babson College business plan competitions

Babson College holds annual business plan competitions for undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, this year the Massachusetts business college held its 22nd competition for graduate students, making it one of the oldest business plan contests in the state.

Undergraduate Track:

Deadline: Dates for the 2010 competition weren’t available online, but last year the deadline for entries was in winter and the finals were in spring.

Top prize: $5,000 (2009)

Graduate Track:

Deadline: Not dates specified for 2010 competition.

Top prize: $20,000 (2009) … Next Page »

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick traveled to Holyoke, MA, yesterday to talk about the next steps for the planned Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a massive project designed to advance the state of the art in “green computing” for life sciences, cleantech, and other applications, while also bolstering business development in economically depressed western Massachusetts. Construction is slated to begin in the fall of 2010 and be completed in late 2011, the governor said.

The partners in the project—which is a collaboration between the Massachusetts state government, Accenture, Boston University, Cisco, EMC, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts—have raised over half of the money needed for construction, according to a press release yesterday from the governor’s office. (The actual dollar amounts weren’t named in the release.)

Since the state’s initial announcement about the project in June, the partners have made “considerable progress” on a working plan for the facility, according to the release. That includes setting up an organizational and business structure for the center, estimating capital costs and operating budgets, outlining a research agenda, and creating preliminary building designs and construction schedules. It’s expected that the facility will be located somewhere near the Connecticut River, which produces abundant hydroelectric power, or along Holyoke’s network of industrial canals, which could provide cooling water for its computing and climate-control equipment.

The three academic institutions contributing to the Holyoke center—BU, MIT, and UMass—issued a statement yesterday saying they are committed to “work diligently over the next 120 days with the Governor, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Bialecki, Energy and Environment Secretary Bowles, and other cabinet officials, Congressman Olver, Holyoke officials and our colleagues in industry to move to the next stage of planning the HPCC.” The statement said the next steps include acquiring a site, setting up agreements on how the various institutions involved will share responsibility for the center, and raising the rest of the money required.

Several entities assisting with the project—the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, the City of Holyoke, and the John Adams Innovation Institute—have also collaborated to launch a website called Innovate Holyoke as a resource for news on the facility. The site was developed by Ten Minute Media, a Web design company run by young Holyoke-based entrepreneur Brendan Ciecko, who wrote about the computing center project for Xconomy in June.

In remarks yesterday, Governor Patrick said the computing center would serve as “an anchor of a highly competitive and vibrant innovation district in the Pioneer Valley,” which includes the three western Massachusetts counties traversed by the Connecticut River. “The potential for job growth and advances in technology and research is unprecedented, and both the center and this collaboration will serve to create long term prosperity for Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”

[Update, 10/23/09: The John Adams Innovation Institute of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has published a useful summary of yesterday's event in Holyoke.]

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In his 2006 run for the Massachusetts governor’s office, Deval Patrick campaigned on the need to make the most of the state’s “creative economy,” meaning industries such as advertising, architecture, design, digital media, film, gaming, marketing, music, publishing, tourism, and the arts. It’s a sector that employs at least 100,000 people in the state, and that has long been one of the Boston area’s strengths. But Patrick’s point was that putting even more emphasis on these industries, through public and private investment, could help to counteract declines in other fields such as manufacturing, bring in more high-paying jobs, and maybe even make life more interesting.

Well, the recession that set in shortly after Patrick took office and the state government’s resulting financial woes have pretty much ruled out significant new public spending on creative-economy programs. There’s even a movement to roll back the state’s one major economic initiative in the arts, the costly film tax credit enacted under Governor Mitt Romney in 2005 and expanded under Patrick in 2007. But Patrick has made good on his campaign promise in other ways, notably by launching a new Creative Economy Council to identify the biggest needs in the creative sectors and appointing a full-time “creative economy industry director” within the Massachusetts Office of Business Development to work directly with companies in these sectors.

The man who fills those shoes—and, so far as Xconomy can tell, the only person in any U.S. state agency explicitly tasked with helping local creative industries—is 33-year-old Jason Schupbach. While peers at the MOBD cover areas such as life sciences and defense, Schupbach’s primary job is to help for-profit businesses in the creative sector find the resources they need to grow in the state. (The MOBD is part of the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development; last month we published an extensive two-part interview with Greg Bialecki, who heads that office.) Schupbach is also pinch-hitting right now as acting technology industry director while that title’s usual holder, Tito Jackson, is on leave to run for an at-large seat on the Boston City Council.

Schupbach seems omnipresent in the entrepreneurship community lately. If you’ve been to recent events such as the TechStars Investor Evening on September 11, the Tech Tuesday game-industry meetup on September 15, or the MassTLC gaming panel at the UK Consulate on September 24, you’ve probably run into him or seen him speak. His oft-repeated refrain at these events is that the Patrick Administration cares about the state’s innovators, and is ready to promote their work in any way it can. One recent mark of that recognition was Patrick’s proclamation of September 9, 2009 (the day Harmonix Music released Beatles: Rock Band) as “Video Game Innovation Day”; Schupbach showed off the signed, leather-bound proclamation at several local meetups.

A 2003 graduate of MIT’s Master in City Planning program, Schupbach studied under the late J. Mark Schuster, a well-known proponent for cultural policies in urban planning. “I was really interested in how the arts and culture and creative fields fit into the design of a city,” Schupbach told me in an interview late last month. “I wanted to be a city designer, but I wasn’t very good at the design part, so I ended up writing my thesis about the trend of cities trying to bring artists into their downtowns.” He won the best thesis award—and went on to do exactly what he had written about, working for New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and then for the Ford Foundation’s Artist Link project, which promotes affordable urban housing for artists.

In our interview, snippets of which are highlighted below, I asked Schupbach to describe his more recent role at MOBD and to talk about the office’s biggest creative-economy initiatives. While the state’s revenue crunch means that his job is largely about directing businesses to existing resources, along with a good measure of cheerleading, Schupbach says a recession is actually a good time to think and plan (that’s one of the roles of the Creative Economy Council, which he coordinates). “The state budget will come back. Things are cyclical,” Schupbach says. “This is the time to plan and write law for when there is money around.”

On the state’s new focus on retaining local innovators:

We are never going to be the state that pays a zillion dollars to move Boeing here. We don’t have oil money like Louisiana. What we have is an enormous amount of talent that’s here already, and we have to figure out the best way to get them to stay here so that we’ll have the next billion-dollar company here. That’s why you see us trying to … Next Page »

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Massachusetts “digital gaming” companies have total revenues exceeding $2 billion, according to a survey being released today by the Mass Technology Leadership Council. And those companies are hiring aggressively, with plans to increase their head counts by an average of 20 percent in 2009, the survey found.

The gaming industry employs roughly 1,200 people across the state, in disciplines like software engineering, digital art, game design, and quality assurance, according to MassTLC—an industry-sponsored association that promotes technology entrepreneurship. Only 8 percent of the companies the association surveyed are public, meaning that most of the ferment in the gaming industry is happening within venture-funded companies (8 percent) or smaller angel-funded or privately funded companies (79 percent).

MassTLC says it collected the survey data between January and June from more than 30 Massachusetts gaming companies, including 38 Studios, GamerDNA, Harmonix Music Systems, Quick Hit, Rockstar New England, Turbine, and WorldWinner. The association says it will use grant money awarded to UMass Boston by the UMass President’s Creative Economy Initiatives Fund to continue its research and “take a deeper dive into the impact of the industry on the Massachusetts economy,” in the words of today’s announcement.

“The digital gaming industry is on fire in Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said in the announcement. “I am committed to supporting this and other creative economy industries, for the job opportunities they create and for what they do to elevate Massachusetts’ strengths as a center of technology innovation.”

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Gregory Bialecki is Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, and leads an ungainly collection of agencies charged with everything from promoting affordable housing in Massachusetts to attracting international business investment to the state. Here at Xconomy, we cross paths with Bialecki quite a bit, since he’s also responsible for many of the state’s initiatives to support high-tech innovation and greater collaboration between business, academia, and government.

I interviewed Bialecki at length last week, and in Part One of our conversation, published yesterday, I asked him how his work as an attorney specializing in real estate development and land-use permitting related to his current business-development role for the state. We also talked about the roles state government can play in promoting innovation. Bialecki said the Patrick Administration has spent much of the past two years simply helping players in various technology sectors to recognize that when it comes to working with business, state government can play a supportive rather than an adversarial role.

In particular, we were talking as Part One closed about the state’s obligation to help business by improving the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math education for young people. In this second half of the interview, I pressed him for more examples of things state government can do to accelerate innovation. And we went on to talk about the need for more funding to move ideas from the lab bench to early-stage commercialization, the debate over non-compete agreements in employment contracts, and the Administration’s progress drafting new business regulations on protecting consumer data.

Xconomy: I think it’s pretty easy for everyone to agree on the importance of science and engineering education. But what are some of the other parts of this innovation agenda—things that maybe are not so easy to agree on?

Secretary Bialecki: There are other aspects of the innovation ecosystem, if you will, where I think we can play a partnering role. When it comes to thinking up great ideas, Massachusetts is fantastic. But when it comes to converting those good ideas into commercial products and services, we need to do a better job. The way to do that is a collaboration between business and academia and government to look systematically at the ways we do that. In other words, what great ideas are behind the university walls right now that aren’t coming out? When I describe the state government [as] having a partnering role, in many cases it’s as simple as being a convenor or facilitator. So, for example, the Governor, who is very interested in innovation, has the capacity to say to all of the public and private universities, “Can we get together and compare notes and talk about how we are commercializing our ideas? Who has the best practices and are there things we can learn from each other? Are there things the state can do to make public universities better at it?”

That’s one of the things we are focused on—learning from universities and businesses the ways we can make these connections better and literally get good ideas out of the lab and into … Next Page »

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From his corner office on the 21st floor of the MacCormack State Office Building on Beacon Hill, Gregory Bialecki has what is probably the best view of any state official in Massachusetts. To the south, the floor-to-ceiling windows peer over Boston Common, Downtown Crossing, the South End, and South Boston; to the east, they look toward Back Bay, the Charles River, and MIT.

But if any official can benefit from such an expansive view, it’s Bialecki. As the secretary of the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, after all, his job is to help all the people he looks out upon find homes to live in and jobs to go to. Because his office includes the state Department of Business Development, he’s also in charge of attracting new employers to Massachusetts and making sure that existing employers stay here and grow. And that means he’s the point man in Governor Deval Patrick’s administration for all efforts to build on the commonwealth’s track record of high-tech innovation, through efforts like the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and the new MassChallenge business plan competition.

In the inaugural post of his “Mass Innovation” blog in July, Bialecki argued that innovation gives Massachusetts its fundamental competitive advantage, but that the state still needs “a deliberate innovation agenda” to improve collaboration between industry, academia, and government. A Newton, MA, resident and Harvard-trained lawyer, Bialecki replaced former Cabinet secretary Daniel O’Connell in January. He invited Xconomy to his office last week for our first formal interview; the questions we covered ranged from Bialecki’s background to non-compete agreements, data privacy regulations, and the role of state government in funding early-stage commercialization work. We’ve condensed and edited this far-ranging conversation. Part 1 follows here; we’ll publish Part 2 tomorrow.

Xconomy: You’ve practiced law with big firms like Hill & Barlow and DLA Piper. What kinds of work did you do for them?

Secretary Bialecki: Over the years, the vast majority of my clients were in real estate development. There’s a lot of moving parts in real estate development. Your clients are buying land, designing projects, getting permits, getting tenants, getting financing. Within that broad outline, my specialty was permitting and land use regulation. So I tended to work with clients who had chosen projects that, by either their size or their location, involved very significant land use issues. For example, with the Fan Pier site in Boston, I represented the Pritzker family at the time they acquired the property. The zoning had been the same for decades, and was consistent with the history of South Boston’s waterfront—there were warehouses and parking lots and an old industrial neighborhood, and Fan Pier itself used to be a trainyard. So if Fan Pier was going to be redeveloped and brought into the current generation…a critical element was to work with the city and the state, because in Massachusetts, waterfront property is subject to very significant state land use regulations. So advancing that involved working with the city and the state to come up with new zoning and land use regulations that would accommodate a new generation of uses for that site [which is now home to a convention center, several hotels, a federal courthouse, and the Institute of Contemporary Art].

X: How do you feel this sort of work prepared you for your current role helping the Patrick Administration interface with the business community?

GB: In permitting and land use work, even when you’re representing private clients, you’re very involved with the public sector, because you’re working very closely with … Next Page »

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