The following is an excerpt from The Economist:
Two of the world’s most innovative cities have the same name and completely opposite problems. That is leading to closer collaboration
CAMBRIDGE, A medieval city 80km (50 miles) north of London, is steeped in innovation. Its university shaped John Milton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. A plaque outside the Eagle pub marks where Francis Crick and James Watson announced the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. It is the birthplace of in vitro fertilisation, the designs that sit in most phones and tablets, and the first humanised monoclonal antibody, a technology used to develop three of the world’s five top-selling drugs. Today it is a global hub for life sciences, semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
It is no coincidence that its successes are echoed by its American namesake: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Many involved in founding Harvard College, its famous seat of learning and America’s oldest university, were Cambridge alumni. In 1638 the colonists renamed the surrounding settlement, founded as New Towne, to honour their alma mater (and that of the college’s benefactor, John Harvard).
Today, the American Cambridge has not so much imitated its British cousin as surpassed it. Harvard mushes into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), another of the world’s best universities. On a curated “innovation trail”, which begins across the Charles river in Boston, various stops celebrate Biogen (one of the area’s earliest biotech companies), Android (an operating system that powers billions of smartphones) and Kendall Square, the biotech hub dubbed the world’s “most innovative square mile”.