We read an interesting article by a Businessweek reporter recently which bemoaned the lack of “innovators” in Boston’s Innovation District, and poked mild fun at those clueless Bostonians unable to pick the district out on a map – even as they were standing in it.
We actually thought the story was fine, an amusingly written fluff piece offering a perhaps unsolicited but nevertheless stimulating outsider’s perspective on the machinations of our famously insular city.
The story even featured a nice photo of our office building on Summer Street, smack dab in the middle of the Innovation District. And yes, we’re big enough to ignore the insinuation that because we work in an office building in an Innovation District that apparently lacks innovators, then we must not be all that innovative ourselves at Banker & Tradesman.
But we won’t speak for our co-tenants or our neighbors throughout this still newly minted Innovation District. Where we can brush off a slight, we’d understand if they can’t.
Because unlike our friends at Businessweek, we recognize that “innovation,” along with its cousin “creativity,” is hard to define. Is our neighborhood any more or less innovative because it features a modest collection of “traditional” media, marketing and service companies sprinkled among the more fashionably “innovative” technology startups and internet companies? We don’t think so.
No, what makes the Innovation District so different from other, more established Boston neighborhoods lies in the name itself.
So much urban planning – or rather, for our purposes, urban branding – is based upon what is or what was. It relies on a straightforward assessment of geography, history or purpose: Boston’s North End and South End neighborhoods lie, of course, to the north and south of the city’s core. The Back Bay sits on land reclaimed from a former basin of the Charles River. The Leather District encompasses a collection of former tanneries and leather goods warehouses. The Financial District is where the finance companies are. The city’s Asian immigrants traditionally congregate, naturally, in Chinatown.
But what makes the Innovation District so special is that it decisively breaks with this convention by creating an identity based on what will be.
Yes, it straddles the more traditional Fort Point and Seaport geographic neighborhoods, and could just as easily have taken their names. But by placing such a nebulous label like “innovation” upon the place, it is made to transcend simple geography. And by shunning a more industry-specific title like “technology district” or “life sciences quarter,” the area is automatically made to feel more welcoming to the kind of entrepreneurial variety necessary to foster innovation in the first place.
The act of innovating, by its nature, involves looking ahead. It involves meeting needs and/or creating demand for products and services that may not yet exist. It doesn’t matter if the innovator is an established media company creating a new way to tell a story and reach an audience, or a small technology team creating the next must-have media app. By putting both in the same place, each innovation is invariably made stronger.
We applaud our city leaders for recognizing that, in this case at least, the essence of innovation lies in its lack of definition. Who cares what type of business comes to this small waterfront neighborhood, or even what the strict borders of this neighborhood are? What matters is what is created because of it.
This neighborhood is yet to be created, and still largely exists in the minds of developers, city planners, entrepreneurs and dreamers. We don’t yet know what it will be or who will be in it.
But because it has purposely been left undefined, we do know that it will take creativity to build it, and that it will welcome innovative ideas and methods as part of that creation.
And in that way, it is already living up to its namesake.
