Ideas percolate in Innovation District
Hopes are high for S. Boston area
They all believe they have invented the next big thing, these engineers, MBAs, and scientists with ideas as lofty as the view from their perch on the 14th floor of a new high-rise on Boston?s waterfront.
A bottle-top filter to solve the world?s drinking-water woes. A stiletto high heel that converts into a comfortable walking shoe. A wind turbine that uses helium to float up to 2,000 feet in the air to generate electricity in the steady breeze aloft.
The creators are among 110 nascent entrepreneurs who have won free office space situated in what city planners are calling the Innovation District, a 1,000-acre swath of South Boston that encompasses much of the view from the 14th floor of One Marina Park Drive at Fan Pier, where entrepreneurial teams will work.
The envisioned district stretches from Fort Point Channel to the Boston Marine Industrial Park, from the Seaport to the Convention Center.
?I would say that we are celebrating Yankee ingenuity here today,?? said Kenneth P. Morse, a founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, speaking at a recent event where the 110 nascent entrepreneurs won not only free office space, but access to business mentors, legal advice, and a shot at a share of $1 million in prize money to bring an idea to market.
?I didn?t do the exact word count,?? Morse said, ?but I heard the word innovation come up 10 or 15 times.??
While the global recession may have stalled some larger projects, officials hope smaller startups could inject the area with creative character. Last week the city began seeking bids for two long-vacant waterside industrial buildings near the tip of the 191-acre peninsula that comprises the Boston Marine Industrial Park.
Planners remain open to offers from seafood companies or other traditional industries, too, but they hope to attract a life science firm, more biotech, or perhaps a pioneer that would redefine maritime industry, like a fish farm or a tidal energy company.
?Everybody expects us to build high-rise condominiums, offices, and retail in the South Boston waterfront; that?s anywhere America,?? Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday. ?I don?t want to be that location of anywhere America. I want it to be a special part of our city, a leader in the new economy.??
The Innovation District marks the latest effort in a once forlorn part of the city that had made great strides in the last decade, but has not yet gelled as the teeming urban neighborhood imagined long ago by city planners. While new hip restaurants and other amenities continue bubbling up, there remain lonesome stretches of highway ramps and parking lots.
?Absolutely, I had to slow down over the past couple of years, but the world slowed down,?? said developer Joseph F. Fallon, who has proceeded cautiously with plans for more offices, stores, and residences, but donated the space for the entrepreneurs at One Marina Park Drive. ?We are starting to see some upticks. I need these small companies in a building like this. I can?t just do it with one major tenant. I need diversity in any building.??
The Innovation District is not an attempt to reinvent the Seaport or Convention Center area, say planners from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, but rather an effort to embrace new industries. The neighborhoods will not work, they say, with just office towers, five-star hotels, and luxury high-rises.
?I think we forget that the development is tied to the bigger economic picture,?? said Gregory Vasil, chief executive officer of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. ?We want it to happen in an instant. If I can?t get that huge employer to come in here and bring 400 or 500 jobs at one time, maybe smaller companies [can] come in and take up some space. I think it?s smart.??
The city?s new endeavor includes a push for some inventive housing that would cater to the laboratory and startup set. At a recent symposium, architects pitched plans to developers for studio apartments with shared kitchens and other common rooms, almost like a dormitory without the college.
The goal would be an inexpensive place to sleep for people such as David Perry, a 23-year-old recent grad from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and one of the forces behind OsmoPure, the bottle-top water filter.
Perry was one winner in the entrepreneurs contest, MassChallenge, sponsored by the state, the city, and private organizations including law firms and businesses. He is moving his infomercial-esque enthusiasm to Boston without a place to live.
?I?ll be couch surfing for a while, I guess,?? said Perry, who has been staying with a cousin in upstate New York.
But city planners do not want to create a hipster playground for the techno elite. The Boston Marine Industrial Park, for example, remains home to almost two dozen seafood companies that scale, filet, and debone an ocean of fish and mollusks, from dayboat stripers caught off Cape Cod to Indonesia crab.
Take North Coast Seafoods, a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation on Drydock Avenue that employs 160 with knives and hairnets. Even this traditional company boasts high tech innovations: super-cold slush ice, seawater purified with ultraviolet light, and a micro lab so precise it detected when dayboats in Gloucester cut back on ice because of the high cost of diesel.
A few factory buildings away, the DNA hackers at Ginkgo BioWorks toil in jeans and gym shoes, cerebral entrepreneurs who make jokes about microbes and use the word bootstrap as a verb. Their airy lab has the familiar hallmarks of a startup.
Outside its windows, workers repair a 950-foot-long naval freighter parked in one of the largest drydocks on the East Coast. It may only be a 30-minute ride on the Silver Line to MIT, but it is a world away from Kendall Square.
?You get a much better deal out here on lab space than in Cambridge,?? said one of the founders, Jason Kelly, 29. ?More people have been coming to ask us about the area, people we know from MIT, looking for space.??
While the area will never become a biotech research cluster like Kendall Square, it could become a hub for other life sciences, said Mark Winters, managing principal of the global life sciences for the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
?There?s a really positive buzz to that whole area,?? Winters said. ?The single biggest challenge facing it, unfortunately, is the state of the economy and the Boston real estate market.??
