Local legends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck rose from the bowels of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (the high school’s drama department really is in the basement) to become international movie stars—and Damon was chosen three years ago to get a star along the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame. But the business leaders who have arisen from places like Harvard University and especially MIT, creating jobs and changing the world in areas from health to education, energy and the environment, office productivity, and home entertainment, are ultimately far more heroic than movie stars. So why not create an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame right here in the world’s densest innovation zone, Kendall Square?

That’s the inspired idea from Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Aulet’s concept is now being championed by Cambridge City Councilor Leland Cheung (who’s also expected to graduate in 2012 with a dual MBA/MPA degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), who says it’s being considered in committee and that he hopes to bring the proposal to the full Council this fall.

Aulet likes a good celebration (he and I and a contingent of other touring basketball players once paraded through the streets of Donegal Town in Ireland, but that’s another story). The idea behind the Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, he says, “comes from my belief that successful entrepreneurship is about spirit as much as it is about skills…Our model is Educate-Nurture-Network-Celebrate. The stars on the sidewalk falls right in line with the ‘Celebrate,’ which we should do more of. If you want to keep a culture of risk-taking and entrepreneurship, then we should treat our entrepreneurs as stars, and what better way than this?” Aulet cites two pieces he wrote for Xconomy that explain more of his thinking along these lines: Celebrate Entrepreneurs Like the Red Wings Winning the Stanley Cup, and How to Build a Successful Innovation Ecosystem: Educate, Network, and Celebrate.

For his part, Cheung says that “every community should take the time to celebrate what makes it great. In Hollywood it’s actors; in Cambridge it’s entrepreneurs. That Kendall Square is the most innovative square mile on the planet is something everyone who lives or works in Cambridge can be proud of. Innovations born in Cambridge have changed the world countless times; I’d like to memorialize a few of those to help inspire everyone who might walk by them.”

Cheung says he sees the courtyard around the Marriott Hotel and the Kendall Square T Station as the perfect place to put the first stars, which would celebrate the entrepreneurs, researchers, and visionaries behind “the great innovations or achievements that have started or taken place in Cambridge.” The squares containing the stars would include the name of the entrepreneur or innovator, the core contribution he or she made, and possibly other details such as the date of the innovation and even its outcome. “Handprints would be great as well,” he says.

I love this idea—and I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be adapted in any of Xconomy’s cities of Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Detroit, or any other tech cluster around the world. Imagine going to Tokyo or Singapore or Basel or Cambridge, England, and finding tributes to innovators you might never have heard of, but who changed your life or cured your disease. Since learning of the Kendall Square idea last week, I’ve been thinking about the top entrepreneurs and innovators to come out of Cambridge over the last century or so, trying to identify the best 25 to 30 to start things off. Here are some names I came up with, in order of their appearance in my mind. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about this list, or who I missed—just drop them in the comments section below.

Edwin Land — prolific inventor and Polaroid co-founder

Harold “Doc” Edgerton — inventor of the strobe and co-founder of EG&G (originally known as Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier)

Phil Sharp — Nobel Laureate biologist at MIT and co-founder of Biogen (and several other biotech companies)

Wally Gilbert — Harvard Nobel Laureate and co-founder of Biogen; also a venture capitalist

Bob Langer — prolific MIT inventor and founder of more than a dozen companies

Rod Brooks — longtime MIT professor and robotics visionary, co-founder of iRobot

Helen Greiner — co-founder of iRobot

Colin Angle — another iRobot co-founder, now its CEO

Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt — former MIT professors, founders of Bolt, Beranek and Newman

Desh Deshpande — co-founder of Sycamore Networks; prolific entrepreneur and angel investor

George Whitesides — legendary Harvard chemist; co-founder of Genzyme and other companies

Tom Leighton — MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics, co-founder of Akamai

Danny Lewin — co-founder of Akamai, killed in 9/11 attacks

Ed Roberts — MIT Sloan School professor, angel investor and co-founder of many companies

Alex D’Arbeloff — co-founder Teradyne, former Chairman of MIT Corporation

Robin Chase — co-founder of Zipcar

Nicholas Negroponte — founder of MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child Fundation

Clay Christensen — Harvard Business School innovation guru

Pattie Maes — computer scientist, entrepreneur

Mitch Kapor — founder of Lotus Development Corporation

Ray Kurzweil — inventor and futurist

Dean Kamen — legendary inventor, founder of FIRST Robotics competition

Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson — founders of DEC

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[Updated. See below. 7:35 pm Eastern time. 2/22/10] Allurent, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of online shopping software, has raised $2 million in its third round of venture capital, company CEO Graeme Grant confirms. The funding will help the company continue to grow sales of an on-demand software product, which was launched about a year ago, according to the CEO. Investors in the round were all repeat backers, including one institutional investor, Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, and a group of angel investors. Jon Flint, a general partner and co-founder of Polaris, is on the board at Allurent. Bob made trip to Allurent, and memory lane, to check out the company’s e-commerce software a few years ago. [Editor's note: This story was updated with information from Grant, who contacted Xconomy after we initially published the news about the financing based on an SEC filing made by the company.]

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I was very sad to learn that Alex d’Arbeloff, one of the towering figures of New England innovation, passed away yesterday at the age of 80.

In 1960, d’Arbeloff founded Teradyne with Nick DeWolf, a classmate from MIT. Working initially in a rented space above a downtown Boston hot dog stand, d’Arbeloff helped build the company into a leading manufacturer of semiconductor test equipment with more than $1 billion in revenues, ultimately stepping down as president and chairman in 1996. A 1949 graduate of MIT, he was a life member of the MIT Corporation and served as its chairman from 1997 to 2003.

As an investor, d’Arbeloff also helped found many area startups. He also served as chair of the board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Many of us will remember him warmly presiding over Chairman’s Salon gatherings at the MIT Museum, where he helped shine a light on local startups and leading innovators.

Says Ed Roberts, professor of management of technology at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center:

Alex was our dear friend and office neighbor at MIT Sloan. He co-taught with us for years on Corporate Entrepreneurship and shared the teaching of technological innovation and entrepreneurship with us for the past four years for our MIT Sloan Fellows Program. One absolutely unique characteristic of Alex, which benefited him, his many corporate associates, and his students, was that he had built Teradyne, a multi-billion dollar corporation, from scratch but he had also invested in and served on the boards for years of many important local high-tech startups including Lotus, Stratus Computer, PRI Automation and others. I served with Alex for many years as co-directors of Pegasystems and admired his insights, energy, integrity and devotion to his role as a corporate board member.

We will sadly miss his thoughtfulness, his immense knowledge, his humor, his loyalty and devotion to MIT and to education, and his friendship.

Ken Morse, managing director of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center, says:

In 1996, he sponsored and paid for one of the two rooms which were the first home of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. [The other was sponsored by Ed Roberts, of course]. Audrey [Dobek-Bell] and I were lucky enough to sit in those two little rooms for our first years on the job.

Alex often urged us to do more in entrepreneurship, and actively supported our cause. He also was the first prof/practitioner that I know of at MIT who tried to teach Engineering students how to sell. He also tackled the soft skills in his famous lecture on “how to give a raise.”

He often talked about surviving failure, and to get a discussion going he would skillfully employ his favorite tack of self deprecating humor: “Hey, I was fired three times. Since I couldn’t get or keep a job, it seemed like a good idea to start our own company…”

Another of his favorite ice breakers was his story of how he missed an alumni reunion at the Sigma Chi fraternity house because he got on the wrong airplane in Newark: “what kind of idiot would get on the wrong plane, and not know it? Well, I did, and I delayed lots of people…in addition to myself ….

Alex was deeply loved all over Boston, not only at MIT.

Howard Anderson, co-founder of Battery Ventures, founder of the Yankee Group, and a distinguished lecturer at the Sloan School:

I went to see Alex about a month ago. He had strong passions…MIT was clearly one of them. The other: Management. He taught one of my classes and you could see the drive to have good management force out bad thinking.He had a strong sense of how things should work.

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