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The 128 boom burst upon an economically depressed area that has scant natural resources for industry, a limited power supply and an uninviting tax structure. But it has two overwhelming advantages: a climate for ideas that has been carefully fostered during its 250 years as a U.S. intellectual headquarters, and the opportunity for pleasant living. The Atlantic Ocean is a few miles away. The mountains are only a short drive. Near by are many science-strong schools: Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts, Northeastern and Boston University. Says M.I.T.'s Engineering Dean Gordon Brown: "To have a place where research-based companies can grow up, you must have a special climate where people are interested in ideas, where they meet to discuss them. These companies are started by people with an intellectual, venturesome spirit."
Off the Blackboard. Most 128 companies stress their academic bent. Their competitive advantage is sheer brainpower—a blackboard, chalk and talent snatched from all across the U.S. They attract many corporation scientists who want to do advance research at local universities—and then they jealously guard these recruits. Said one 128 president: "We don't let our chief scientist out of town without a duenna." At the same time, Route 128 companies draw as part-time consultants the fulltime professors and graduate students who want to put their ideas into action in industry (and to reap its rewards).
One of the first companies to utilize the area's resident brainpower is now big, well-known and a darling of Wall Street: Polaroid. Edwin Herbert Land, 50, the founder-president who left Harvard to work on his first polarized light project in 1926 and later invented the Polaroid Land camera, actively cultivates an academic atmosphere in the plants. Every year he hires a few Smith or Wellesley girls for laboratory work, considers them a prime source of fresh ideas. Several have made notable contributions to Polaroid's quick photography. "Everyone," says Land, "whether he is a worker on the assembly line or a scientist in the lab, has some real urge and need for creative participation in industrial activity."
Weaning Process. Another firm that leans heavily on the universities is Raytheon, the major missilemaker (Sparrow, Hawk), which was co-founded by M.I.T. Scientist Vannevar Bush and is now bossed by Harvard-bred Banker Charles Francis Adams (TIME, June 23, 1958). Raytheon keeps 30 to 40 university consultants on tap for problems, pays them $75 to $100 a day. Some 128 consultants get up to $10,000 a year ("More than they earn by teaching," says one Raytheon executive).
Faculty boards have become reconciled to the fact that consulting jobs keep many valuable men and women at the university, while they otherwise might be tempted into industry. M.I.T.. which stars in both pure and applied research (Dr. Bush developed the first electronic computers there in the 1930s), goes even farther: it feels a responsibility to pioneer techniques for industry. "We get a thing dry behind the ears and wean it." says M.I.T.'s Dean Brown. "Weaning means kicking it off the campus."
Among the companies weaned by M.I.T. and the other schools: