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Executives call for Massachusetts economic strategy-Business leaders ask Romney to embrace development agenda

State business leaders are calling on Governor-elect Mitt Romney to pursue an ambitious economic-development agenda they say has been ignored by previous Republican governors.

By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff

Their concerns are spelled out in a report set for release today by the business-backed research group Mass Insight. Titled ”An Economy at Risk,” it is meant to prod the Romney transition team to take stands on executives’ top concerns.

The report lists shortcomings in the state’s support for public universities and technology-development initiatives and calls on Romney to appoint a science-and-technology official to help the state compete for jobs against New York, Texas, and California. According to the report, those states have outpaced Massachusetts in funding research initiatives in emerging fields.

The report says the state’s own public universities ”are among the most difficult institutions for companies to deal with” in setting up new programs. And private schools including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produce too little local economic spinoff, the report says.

”In an environment where other states are aggressively competing for high-tech businesses and jobs, it is irresponsible for Massachusetts state government to leave the future of its leading and most promising sectors to chance,” says Ray Stata, chairman of Norwood-based chipmaker Analog Devices, in the report.

The document puts the heat on a transition team Romney named last week to study economic development. Romney hasn’t endorsed some of the ideas that Stata and senior executives from other major Massachusetts employers including EMC Corp. and General Electric have been pressing throughout the fall.

Stata said in an interview yesterday that he expects a favorable response, partly because a member of Romney’s economic team is Christopher Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, which helped prepare the Mass Insight report. But a major obstacle is how to balance any new development agenda with a pending state budget shortfall of as much as $2 billion.

”Massachusetts has no long-term technology vision or strategy,” the report says. Even programs that shouldn’t involve new costs – such as streamlining construction-permitting processes – have been neglected, said Mass Insight president William Guenther.

Mass Insight allies, including MIT president Charles Vest and University of Massachusetts president William M. Bulger, have been pressing similar ideas as Romney’s economics committee prepares to meet. The committee’s chairman, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, played a similar role in 1991 drawing up suggestions for the first Weld administration.

Then, Porter urged the state to reduce taxes on business, make better use of its universities, and use tax credits to support research. Many of these ideas were later passed into law.

But the Romney team has yet to indicate its leanings. On the campaign trail, Romney said little about economic development other than to describe his experience as a former venture capitalist. Porter’s office directed questions to another committee member, Jeff Grogan, a Monitor Group consultant, who said at least some of Mass Insight’s prescriptions had merit, including the creation of a new science-and-technology adviser.

Investing major sums of public money in new research initiatives could be difficult, Grogan cautioned.

”There’s a calling for something like that, but finding a way to get it done is the issue,” he said.

A spokesman for Romney’s transition team, Eric Fehrnstrom, said Romney was sympathetic to Mass Insight’s concerns but said he wouldn’t discuss specifics until they had been reviewed by the economics committee.

While much of Mass Insight’s report is critical of previous administrations, its authors and others noted that the technology-fueled boom of the late 1990s reduced the importance of economic-development work.

The report is being presented to members of Romney’s economics panel today. One concern is that prestigious universities like Harvard and MIT don’t play as big a role as they could in the state’s economy.

For instance, MIT runs its Industrial Liaison Program, which gives companies access to 80 university research labs for a basic fee of $50,000. But half the program’s 185 members are foreign corporations.

Alex d’Arbeloff, MIT’s chairman, says in the report that new initiatives at the university are meant ”to change the equation and get MIT research in to small, local companies.”

Ross Kerber can be reached at [email protected].

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/326/business/Executives_call_for_economic_strategy+.shtml

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