The organisers of ICMLG'14 provided delegates with a treat to cap of the first day of the conference—a guided visit to the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC). After a somewhat circuitous transfer from Babson to CIC—in a yellow grade school bus no less—we were provided with a guided tour of the facility, after which we were given the opportunity to interact with many of the people that work there. The CIC is a huge facility. It's quite unlike anything I had seen before. Some notable points about the CIC (for me at least) included:
  • Adjacent to MIT, CIC is a serviced office facility on steroids. It is designed to bring entrepreneurs, startups and ambitious people and the companies together, into a community where they can work on their ideas, grow (if they are any good) and maybe even secure investment to really take off.
  • It claims to be the largest facility of its type in the world, with more startups clustered in one place than anywhere else in the planet
  • Approximately 700 companies, from one-person hot-desk type operations, through to larger established companies (including Apple and Google, we were told) are located there. Five hundred of them are startups, all of whom are ambitiously hoping to become scale-ups (a new term I learnt: it's the next level beyond a startup, once the company is underway).
  • Companies resident at the CIC have attracted over US$1.8bn of investment and venture capital (wow, that's a serious number, and is indicative of the calibre of the ideas and the people behind them).

The concept of providing a large-scale facility for startups to come together, rub shoulders with each other and with supporting enterprises (from food, gym and back-office support, to funders, lawyers and other large-scale firms) makes sense. My early view is that this type of facility runs rings around incubators and small-scale clusters that you see elsewhere. The vital difference is the support of the large firms and the resources they bring. 

We spent a couple of hours on the site, including receiving a briefing on the Smart Cities concept, before moving off to dinner at the Charthouse—a relaxing cap to a busy day.