Cambrige, a medieval city 80km 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".
The two Cambridges are not exactly rivals. They are mirror images: on the surface almost identical, but with opposite problems. Rather than exploiting each other's weaknesses, over the past years they have grown to work much more closely together to offset them. The relationship is unequal, but increasingly conjoined.
Both are among the world's most efficient innovation engines, driven primarily by their world-class academic research. Each produces far more alumni founders per person than Silicon Valley (who, even more than the tech bros they seem to resent, talk constantly of changing the world, and curing cancer). Nobel prize-winners regularly bump into one another in Kendall Square and on King's Parade across the pond.
After the Bay Area, the Cambridges are the world's densest innovation clusters per person, though which comes first depends on what you count. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) produces a Global Innovation Index, which measures density by a cluster's global share of patent awards, scientific citations and venture-capital (or vc) deals. It ranks Britain's Cambridge ahead of Boston-Cambridge, in second and third respectively. Dealroom, a data provider that ranks the ecosystems on enterprise value and the number of unicorns (private firms worth more than $1bn), reverses the Cambridge, Britain 1,918 order.
Britain's Cambridge may have the edge in research, the rankings suggest, producing more scientific publications and filing more patents relative to the size of its population than Boston-Cambridge does. Boston, however, commercialises it better. (WIPO reckons that the world's most innovative cluster overall is around the Chinese city of Shenzhen.)
The American Cambridge is the more advanced ecosystem mostly because of its scale. WIPO estimates the Boston-Cambridge cluster is home to around 4.3m people, compared with only 500,000 in greater Cambridge (both Cambridges have similar numbers of inhabitants, but only one happens to be next to a metropolis). Kendall Square is one subway stop along from two of the world's best hospitals. Companies are only a train-ride away from the world's biggest stockmarkets in New York.
Massachusetts has built on these advantages. An infusion of capital into life sciences has funded upgrades to infrastructure such as roads and sewage systems. Success and tax incentives have helped attract vc funds and pharmaceutical firms to buy biotech startups' drugs. "It's easier to count the pharma companies that don't have a presence in Cambridge;•says Tim Clackson, a British biopharma executive who has lived stateside for decades. Companies tend to stay and scale, such as Biogen and Moderna, a biotech firm best known for its covid-19 vaccine.
Contrast that with the British Cambridge. Two of Britain's three biggest firms by market cap-Arm, a microchip designer, and AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant
-have their headquarters there. AstraZeneca had threatened to leave Britain, but in April announced a £3oom ($4oom) investment in the country. Yet the "real Cambridge", as Hawking referred to it, remains constrained by its medieval skin. Cows still graze in the city centre. The place struggles to provide enough housing, water and transport for its growing population. In recent years, a shortage of facilities has forced science startups to use office space as makeshift labs.
Article credit - The Economist.