Route 128: Lessons From Boston's High Tech Community

This is the story of how a stretch of highway, Route 128, circling Boston, became America best-known centre of high-tech industrial innovation. It addresses the importance of the region "Route 128", examines the forces that shaped it, and the role people and events there played in determining the course of the overall relationship among industry, academia and government in American society. The book is also a prescription for duplicating that experience elsewhere to meet the mounting pressures of the world marketplace. The fruitful marriage of industry, the federal government and higher education in Massachusetts produced new fields of research, novel inventions, spin-off companies, entire new industries, new academic disciplines and innovative federal agencies like the National Science Foundation. The book highlights the roles of "ultimate entrepreneurs" such as Digital Equipment's Ken Olsen and of academic impresarios such as Vannevar Bush of MIT. The authors also explain why "the Massachusetts Miracle" appeared to have fizzled out by the end of the 1980s as the national and regional economies slid into recession and high-tech companies laid off thousands.