Is it possible MIT is feeling inadequate — insecure even?
That seems hard to imagine for the school that helped invent the transistor radio, radar, Technicolor, modern robotics, and essentially the field of biotechnology, and whose famous graduates include a Treasury secretary, Israeli prime minister, an astronaut who walked on the moon, and dozens of Nobel Prize winners.
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is facing increasing competition from around the corner and across the country.
Its neighbor, Harvard University, is building an innovation campus and business park in Allston to rival MIT’s backyard in Kendall Square. And in Silicon Valley, Stanford University has emerged as the center of gravity for this exciting new era, in which seemingly every other bright young student is starting a new company, and more than a few of them are becoming overnight millionaires.