Innovation Engine
CIC co-founder Tim Rowe shares his entrepreneurial journey and vision for collaboration in Japan.
Like so many new graduates, Tim Rowe and his friends from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) left their Cambridge campus with diploma in hand and took “ordinary” jobs. A few years later, in 1999, they quit those jobs to build
start-ups.
But they needed offices—not the easiest thing for young entrepreneurs to pay for in a town that’s home to two of the world’s most prestigious universities. So they decided to share a space near MIT and Harvard to lighten the financial load. At least one of their companies would make it, they thought.
The shared space led them down an unexpected path, however, as more companies moved in and they went from five to 10 to 50 to 100. The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) was born.
Fast forward two decades and CIC opened its first Asia facility in Tokyo, in the Toranomon Hills Business Tower. The ACCJ Journal sat down with Rowe in the bustling networking hub to learn more about how he went from sharing a space with friends to leading a community for entrepreneurs that includes more than 1,000 companies at centers in eight cities around the world.
How did CIC expand?
For the first 13 years or so, we just grew right there in Cambridge. I had little kids at the time and didn’t really want to travel as much. And Cambridge is an amazing place for start-ups. So, we just kept taking more space and filling it. It was really kind of a surprise to us. We didn’t set out to build a shared space for start-ups as a business. We were actually just
using it for ourselves.
My mother had been the ombudsman at MIT, and one of her friends who had been the provost of MIT, Mark Wrighton, had become the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, one of the top medical schools in the United States. She said, “Mark called and wants you to come to St. Louis.” I was about to give all the reasons why I didn’t know if I could do that, but then she was like, you gotta go. Okay, Mom. So, I flew to St. Louis and met with Mark Wrighton. He said, “Look, we want you here, and we’re going to help you figure it out.”
One thing led to another and we opened in St. Louis. A few years later, the federal government was looking for a home for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and they toured St. Louis. They came to our center and said this is the kind of vibe they were looking for. They actually testified before Congress that they selected St. Louis because of their experience at our center. It was a $2 billion investment, a big deal for the local economy. After that, as other people came and knocked on the door, we said, “Sure, let’s look into it.”
How has the view of start-ups changed?
If you survey new college graduates, they often say the number one thing they want to do is go create a start-up. I think it’s good for the world, because what we’ve learned is that innovation has the power to make the world better in so many ways. But what we’re finding is that innovation gets into the world, is adopted and spreads much more quickly, through new enterprises rather than existing ones.
When we’re part of a larger organization, we want to respect all the rules that exist in that organization. Doing new things becomes rather hard. We hear things such as, “We tried that once and it didn’t work,” or “That sounds interesting, but that’s 1/1,000 of the revenue of this company, so we can’t prioritize it.” That’s normal, and it’s been well studied. But the bottom line is that existing enterprises find it very difficult to introduce true innovation.
“They understand that it’s not about them so, when there’s something really new and interesting that they have in their company, they push it out. It’s like asking your teenager to move out of your house. It’s time now, it’s time to go off.”
I think the smarter of the big organizations understand this. They understand that it’s not about them, so, when there’s something really new and interesting that they have in their company, they push it out. It’s like asking your teenager to move out of your house. It’s time now, it’s time to go off. They do the same thing and take those teams and move them out of headquarters.
Why did CIC choose Japan?
There’s a personal reason and there are professional reasons. The personal reason is that, in my youth, my dad said that if I studied Japanese for a while he would help me get an internship here. And my grandmother spent about 10 years in Asia in her youth, in the 1920s—mostly in China but some in Japan—and she taught me kanji when I was a kid. That all got me interested in Japan, and I was fortunate to do an internship here during high school.
Professionally, if you look at the most successful companies in the world—and you can use any measure, but one would be the Russell 2000 Index—all those companies were at one point start-ups. So, another way to look at that list is that it is a list of the 2,000 most successful start-ups ever. When you break them down by country, you find that the United States and Japan tie for the number of companies on the list adjusted by population. So, historically, Japan ties for number one as a place to build start-ups. That’s a reason to be here.
Photos: ©CIC Tokyo
Is the Japanese government doing enough to support start-ups?
Building a start-up ecosystem is a decade-long process. A piece can come from a supportive government, and it’s really terrific that the Japanese government is leaning in. Other governments that have leaned in, such as Israel, have done really well. It’s clear that a national policy that pushes in this direction can pay big dividends.
But it’s not the only thing that needs to happen. You also need the entrepreneurs themselves. And I think the Japanese innovation ecosystem is responding. These days, if you talk to young Japanese people—and this is a change, perhaps just like what started to happen a decade ago in the United States—you see many more who say they want to build a start-up.
I see Japanese universities leaning into this, which is important. They’re doing entrepreneur programs like those US universities started a decade or more ago. I see a growing awareness of, and interest in, what we call innovation infrastructure. This is things such as shared wet laboratories, the physical infra-structure that allows for new start-ups in, let’s say, the biotech field.
We’ve built shared workspaces focused on a number of industries. The largest so far is the wet lab for life sciences. We collaborated with others to found a nonprofit doing that in Cambridge. It’s called LabCentral and is, as far as we are aware, the largest shared wet lab on the planet. It’s over 20,000 square meters and has every possible piece of equipment you would need in life sciences. Then we figured out how to make that commercially viable and built a similar facility, a commercial one, called CIC Labs in Philadelphia. It’s the largest commercial shared wetland facility in the world, to our knowledge.
How can Japan and the United States work together?
The good news is that the interests are very aligned for Japan, for the United States, for Japanese companies, and for US companies in Japan. Everyone in this circle benefits when they figure out how to get these collaborations to work well, and set a different way.
If you aren’t out there working with new technologies, which are often coming from start-ups, then you’re at risk that you’ll be Airbnb’d or Uber’d. You’re in the hotel business and someone figures out another way to have lodging. You’re in the taxi business and someone figures out another way to get people around the city.
“If you aren’t out there working with new technologies, which are often coming from start-ups, then you’re at risk that you’ll be Airbnb’d or Uber’d.”
This is core to the ACCJ itself. Really, what you’re talking about is brokering conversations. You’re getting people to know each other and to talk about what they’re doing, and how they might help each other.
When I was a young person at the Mitsubishi Research Institute in the early 1990s, I was a member of the ACCJ, because I saw—and I convinced my bosses—that the connections that could be made were meaningful and important. I think it’s no less relevant today. And I think that, as many of these companies have evolved, one of the things they’ve come to realize is that, while the connections between larger organizations are important, the connections between larger organizations and smaller fledgling ones are also important. The challenge is figuring out how to find those little companies and how to know which ones to work with.
What’s next for CIC in Japan?
We were approached by Nishitetsu, the major private railway company in Kyushu. They said, we like what we see at CIC Tokyo and we’d like to work with you to build another one in Fukuoka. We have announced that we’re in a formal collaboration and will soon finish all the due diligence to make sure this will really work. Then we can announce if, in fact, we’re moving ahead with construction, but it’s looking very good and we’re excited to be headed to the second site.
We’re also in several conversations about building some of those shared wet laboratories, robotics laboratories, and other kinds of deep tech shared spaces here in Japan.
We’d love to hear from Journal readers on this; if they have ideas, they should let us know. We think there’s a lot of demand for this kind of innovation infrastructure. Not only does it propel start-ups, but it also creates an environment much like CIC Tokyo does, where larger companies can interact with, and find interesting, smaller companies. Those are our two main areas in the future: more in deep tech and more locations around Japan.
