"How can we become innovative, like MIT, and the startup companies of Route 128 and Silicon Valley?" That's the most frequently asked question I've heard in the last 25 years, as individuals and organizations in Europe and Asia, but also in the United States, strive to get on the bandwagon of high-tech innovation. Thousands of books and magazine articles purport to answer this question. Yet the ones I've seen don't quite match the ingredients I have found to be important among the most successful of the MIT Lab for Computer Science's 60-some startups.

Two ingredients, risk-aware capital and a high-tech infrastructure, are obvious, but rarely in place. In Europe and Asia investors talk about risk, but their psyches propel them toward the comfort of guarantees. They are not prepared to lose 10 startups for a 100-fold appreciation in the one that makes it big. In the United States, where capital is usually risk-aware, it is often greedy and lacks staying power-two additional avenues to failure. And in many regions of the world, there is little infrastructure in the form of silicon foundries, design houses, and the human experts behind them to ensure that a fledgling high-tech company will have quick and easy access to such key resources.