Susannah Malarkey, the executive director of the Technology Alliance in Seattle, spent three days earlier this month in Boston with a group of Seattle civic and business leaders as part of the 2010 Intercity Study Mission. These annual trips, organized by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce since 1983, enable Seattle business leaders to pick the brains of civic leaders from around the country and bring the lessons back home to the Northwest on venture capital, urban planning, and education.

In the 27 years the program has been around, this was the third time Seattle representatives have looked to Boston for tips on how to foster community, growth, and local industry. There’s a reason why we keep coming back. Boston has a comparable population to Seattle with just half the landmass and a long history as a standout cluster for academia, innovation, and startup culture. Boston has a lot to offer Seattleites as we are planning for our own city’s future, Malarkey says. I dropped by Susannah’s office last week and spoke with her about the trip. Here are a few of the most important lessons she took away from our sister city to the east:

Reconnecting to the Waterfront

In 2006 Boston completed the most expensive highway tunneling project in the country, the “Big Dig,” which rerouted the city’s Central Artery, Interstate 93, through downtown and away from the waterfront. The project, which went billions of dollars over budget and six years past its initial completion deadline, is often compared to the proposed deep-bored tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct along Seattle’s waterfront. And though the two projects are  different, according to Malarkey, there is much to be learned from both the Big Dig and its aftermath. What were the biggest hiccups in the project? How do we ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes? What can we do once the project is completed to help our city reconnect to its waterfront?

Former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Fred Salvucci, often referred to as the “godfather” of the project, told the visitors from Seattle about the major road bumps Boston experienced during the Big Dig. On the top of the list: inconsistent management. He emphasized the need to have a clear vision, measurable objectives, and strong and consistent leadership to successfully complete a project of this size, Malarkey says.

“It was an enormous project, they had switched management, and it was so huge and so complex that not having consistent management was really key to not having it finish on time,” Malarkey says.

In Boston’s case, finishing the project was only the first part of the equation. The second part was reviving the city’s waterfront, even when little resources remained. Instead of using taxpayer dollars, … Next Page »

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For more than 60 years, the number of jobs in manufacturing has been on the decline in Massachusetts. But that trend is finally at an end, say the authors of a new report, Staying Power: The Future of Manufacturing in Massachusetts.

The large employment losses are over because most of the firms that couldn’t survive in the new globalized economy have already shut down or left the state. “What’s left consists of highly sophisticated producers that contribute mightily to state output and employment, and that, for the most part, are able to survive in this new economic environment,” according to the report, which was prepared by Northeastern University’s Center for Urban and Regional Policy and was presented today at a public forum at the Boston Foundation.

In fact, most of the employers reckon that they will increase their workforce during the coming years, according to a survey of more than 700 Massachusetts manufacturing firms that’s included in the report. More than 60 percent of the firms expected to have more workers five years from now, while just 12 percent expected their employee base to shrink during the same period.

Still, manufacturing isn’t what it used to be in Massachusetts. Just after WorldWar II, four out of 10 workers in the Commonwealth were employed by manufacturing firms, producing a range of goods “from textile fabrics to aircraft engine parts,” according to the report. Today, barely 10 percent of the state’s jobs are in manufacturing.

The really big dip started in the mid-1980s. Up till then, more than 600,000 people worked in industry, a number that has now dropped to 300,000. But there are big differences between sectors, say the report’s authors, with relatively small job losses occurring in high-tech sectors like electronics and computer hardware.

Of course, the future of manufacturing is not just about jobs, but about making money by producing goods. This in turn means keeping productivity high, to compete with low-cost competitors in other parts of the world. Evidently, that’s something people are good at around here. During the period from 1997 to 2006, manufacturing productivity grew twice as fast in Massachusetts as in the nation as a whole. During the period the state’s output “increased by an extraordinary 61 per cent to nearly $40 billion,” the report says.

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My favorite deal from last week was the last one, but it’s a little hard to capture the idea of core-sampling frozen sperm in a headline. (Or at least a headline suitable for a family publication such as our own.)

—Castile Ventures of Waltham, MA, led a $13 million Series B investment in Sunnyvale, CA’s Agito Networks. Also participating was another Waltham firm, Battery Ventures, which led the 2006 Series A round for Agito, whose technology allows users to easily roam between public cellular networks and internal WiFi networks.

—Hopkinton, MA-based Alseres Pharmaceuticals, (NASDAQ: ALSE), which develops neurological drugs and diagnostics, raised $5 million in convertible debt from one of its former directors, Robert Gipson of Ingalls & Snyder Value Partners.

—Boston-based .406 Ventures led a Series B funding round for Brooklyn, NY-based Kaltura. The New York startup makes the open-source video platform used by Wikipedia and other online publications.

—Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) of Waltham, MA, acquired RNAi firm Open Biosystems of Huntsville, AL, for an undisclosed sum.

—Progress Software of Bedford, MA, acquired competitor Mindreef of Hollis, NH, for an undisclosed sum. Both firms make software aimed at building and maintaining so-called service oriented architectures (SOA).

—Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST) inked a deal with AstraZeneca worth at least $20 million to promote the pharma giant’s intravenous antibiotic, Merrem.

—Allied Minds, an investment firm focusing on nascent firms built around university research, backed CryoXtract, a Harvard/Northeastern University startup developing a new way to take out small amounts out of frozen biological materials like blood or sperm. Think of tiny little core samples and you get the idea.

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It’s one of the paradoxes of modern medicine in the United States. At the doctor’s office and the drugstore, we say we want prescription drugs. In fact, we spend more than $200 billion on them every year. Between 1994 and 2005, a period in which the U.S. population increased by only 9 percent, the number of prescriptions patients had filled increased by a whopping 70 percent.

But when we get home, a strange intransigence sets in: large numbers of people never use the prescriptions they’ve been given, or don’t take them as directed. In a Harris Interactive poll last year, 35 percent of people said that fear of adverse reactions had kept them from taking prescriptions they’d already filled. The National Community of Pharmacists says that 24 percent of people fail to take the recommended dosage of their prescribed medicines, and that 29 percent stop taking them before they run out.

The healthcare industry’s term for this is “nonadherence,” and it’s a serious problem. The hit to the U.S. economy from health conditions that worsen when people don’t take their prescriptions correctly has been estimated at $200 billion to $300 billion a year.

Into this gap steps InnovationRx, a Newton, MA startup that thinks it can help improve medication adherence using electronic communications channels like e-mail, text messages, and live and automated phone calls. That idea, by itself, isn’t new; in fact, at least two other New England companies, Needham, MA-based Dovetail Health and New Haven, CT-based Intelecare, already offer similar outreach services. But InnovationRx isn’t just a reminder service. “What we are really setting out to do is identify the reasons for people not taking their medications”—and then craft a plan to convince them otherwise, company president Sean Teare told me last week.

“From a quick, 20-question online assessment we’re able to, first, determine who is likely to be nonadherent, and second, identify the reasons,” says Teare. “Is it cost? Fear of the side effects? Not understanding what the medication is supposed to do? Then we tailor an intervention based on that, and deliver it through the Web, or through a call center staffed by people trained in motivational interventions.”

Teare gave me the story behind InnovationRx in anticipation of the company’s official launch later this summer. As I noted in my roundup of Boston-area “Health 2.0″ companies yesterday, there’s likely to be a string of debuts this year by local startups that, like newcomer American Well, use Web technology either to reach patients or to process patient records, or both. I already knew, because I’d been told on embargo, that InnovationRx was one of them.

Teare, a former executive at TAP Pharmaceutical Products in Illinois, says the company devised its assessment system in collaboration with Nate Rickles, a professor in the School of Pharmacy at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Rickle’s PhD research focused on depression, where nonadherence is a major … Next Page »

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