Paul Grogan is the president and CEO of the Boston Foundation. Through its grant making to non-profit organizations, it responds to critical challenges to a constantly changing community by supporting high-impact, innovative programs. Below, Paul is interviewed about Collaboration in Massachusetts. See more industry leaders speak about Collaboration here.

What’s the hardest part about collaboration?

As a colleague once said: “Collaboration is an unnatural act between non-consenting adults.”

People are often very comfortable doing their own work. You may realize intellectually that an industry may benefit from a collaborative effort, but if there doesn’t seem to be a good process, a lot of collaboration dies on the vine. If it doesn’t appear to be generating results, people tend to go back to their own cubbyhole. It’s crucial that the value proposition be demonstrated fairly early, that people can see the potential payoff.

How did you first become an advocate of collaboration?

My first extensive experience with collaboration was when I was in city government in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to administer federal government grants. The work started in the Carter administration and accelerated during the Reagan years. Whole parts of city government were defined by the administration of federal grants, attempting to solve problems. It was an era of extraordinary public-private partnerships, reaching out to the business community and the philanthropic sector. It was a process of discovering the power of collaborative partnerships. I was captivated by the opportunity to work across institutional lines to solve problems.

How has it influenced your work at The Boston Foundation?

Collaboration has not necessarily been a strong suit of the city historically. There’s been a lot of fractiousness and division, I think.

There was clearly a lack of collaboration at the region’s failure to lead in the computing revolution after a certain point.

At The Boston Foundation, we’ve been very interested in systematic collaboration that can actually make a difference. We were very pleased to have played a role in the idea of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Collaborative, helping to put the whole cluster together in a strategic partnership. It’s really rolling now.

I think that this is the kind of approach that can work across a number of sectors with the right leadership and buy-in and focus. We’d love it if this kind of collaboration took hold as a modus operandi in a number of sectors.

What do you think is the key to creating successful collaboration? What are the challenges?

It’s more a question on understanding what’s going on; is there a role that we can play? With the Life Sciences collaborative, we played a role in pulling everyone back together, in being persistent, after initial efforts had floundered. We had the convening power to put up some initial resources.

In terms of challenges, the marketing of the city and the region has been very deficient. We haven’t made the most of what we have. We have these incredible assets that the world envies – our higher education, our talent level, our universities and hospitals.

Some believe that it will speak for itself; if you don’t recognize how great and wonderful we are, that’s your problem. It’s crazy.

Massachusetts is traditionally not seen as a pro-business environment. We don’t have a tradition of courting industry. It has been done episodically, fitfully. One of the hopes I have is that these multiplying collaboratives create a new culture of inspiration for prosperity and job growth.

I once asked the CEO of a large corporation located here: How many times had the CEO been visited by a politician at any level and asked to engage in creating more jobs? The response: That conversation has never occurred.

We need to build this new culture to help encourage job growth and prosperity. To be the place where the private sector is growing their companies, because of the innovations coming out the innovations.

Steve Vinter is the engineering director and site manager of Google’s Boston operations. He recently worked with MBTA to add Boston to Google Transit. Below, Steve is interviewed about Collaboration in Massachusetts. See more industry leaders speak about Collaboration here.

After the June 10 gathering of the IT/digital sector in Cambridge, what has been the focus of the workforce and talent committee, on which you serve as co-chair with Jim Kurose?

Jim and I have spent a lot of time continuing to talk with people in the IT sector, in higher education and in STEM programs to better understand how the IT Collaborative can help. When I got involved in this, I quickly observed that there is a very healthy entrepreneurial community, and people are eager to become more connected and involved.

Yes, everyone seems to welcome the idea of getting to know everyone else in the community, to make the community tighter, to start initiatives.

The challenge for the talent and workforce development group is that the scope of the area is extremely broad, including everything from K-12 education, higher education, and retraining. And there are already a gadzillion educational initiatives.

The key, I think, the hard part, is framing the discussion, because there are so many different initiatives, and so much work done to date in this area.

It sounds like the horns of a dilemma: What comes first, the dialogue, or the initiatives?

This is really hard work right now, as we attempt to get a clear sense of what we want to do. It’s also a great place to be. Everyone is eager to help, but there is almost a lack of leadership, as if people are looking for someone to tell them what to do to have a bigger impact than what’s been done already.

The work has been challenging, amazing and surprising; it’s different from what I expected.

The thing we need to do now is to pull together like-minded people and mobilize their efforts. The leadership will be about facilitation – listening, letting the process evolve in its own way.

What excites me is that there are so many bright, engaged people, all of whom want to see progress – to promote economic success, closely tied to improving education.

I think that there is shared agreement about what the problems are: the pipeline for talent is not large enough to handle the demand, and the pipeline is not growing. The focus needs to be on making education in science and technology more engaging, to stimulate young people’s interest early.

At the June 10 gathering, Jim Kurose mentioned that, in regard to educational initiatives, it’s more than just teaching mathematical or science skills, it’s about students learning how use computational thinking.

Yes, it’s learning how to be analytic and how to solve problems collaboratively, rather than plugging into an existing process or simply learning to use tools. Perhaps there’s a parallel to the work we’re doing now in the IT Collaborative. We have a lot of creative people throughout the Massachusetts public and private education and the IT sector, and we need to construct a framework on how to engage a greater set of people to collaboratively improve and expand the educational system feeding the sector.

We’re currently thinking that we need to organize a series of workshops to share ideas and knowledge about what’s been done to date, pulling together like-minded individuals and create the necessary framework for collaborating, and then mobilizing the efforts of a larger group of people.

There has been a lot of enthusiasm and people are working together really well; I can only say nice things about the entire Organizing Committee.

In our continued endeavor to foster collaboration and conversation throughout the sector, we recently brought together association heads to discuss the future of technology and innovation in Massachusetts and New England.

We spoke about fostering ongoing engagement, and charting a  clear path towards engaging the broader tech and innovation communities in the conversation about the future of the sector.

Here, Kiki Mills, President of the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, writes a summary of the day and goals:

I attended a meeting yesterday with fellow association heads to hear about the progress to date on the Innovate Masstech initiative. For the unfamiliar, in late January, Governor Deval Patrick asked the region’s IT/digital sector to work together to find a common voice and embrace the challenge of expanding the region’s innovative capacity and sector preeminence. . . . Read More

Below, Emily Nagle Green is interviewed about Collaboration in Massachusetts. See more industry leaders speak about Collaboration here.

Is there a “collaboration gene” in Massachusetts?

GREEN: Yes, I would say that we have a collaboration gene here, but it’s a bit latent. And I think that’s because there’s also a technology entrepreneur gene, a New England Yankee ‘gut it out and make it happen’ gene. That’s a great quality to have. That behavior, however, sometimes blinds us to the opportunities to accelerate our success by collaboration with others.

We have the ability, we have the talent, and we understand the intrinsic value of collaboration, that it is a form of enlightened self-interest. But we probably don’t practice collaboration as much as we should; our behavior is often focused on being the tough soldier, to stick it out, to suck it up.

Fortunately, it’s very much a generational issue. The playing field is changing now. Entrepreneurs in their 20s are more influenced by entrepreneurial behaviors around the globe and on the Internet than they may be by local and regional activity. It’s more natural for them to reach out to personal social networks.

Here in Massachusetts, we need to create some infrastructure in the innovation ecosystem to encourage and support this kind of collaboration, such as the new venture café in Cambridge. We need to have regular places for people to meet and talk, and publicized mentoring programs. We need to create more programs that explicitly encourage young people to build careers in tech and to stay here to do it.

Does there need to be a better way of telling the story about the good things that are happening here in Massachusetts?

GREEN: Yes. As a friend of mine says, “Let’s not die with our secret.” Let’s make sure that we spend time talking about what’s working. The fact that this region has become a hotbed of mobile innovation activity is not very well known, for instance.

We need to do a better job of telling ourselves, our potential investors, our graduating students, and many more audiences out there what’s right about this region. We have started the process to create a fresh, relevant, powerful identity that’s contemporary, one that reflects the tremendous diversity in today’s technology innovation in the region.

We can always come up with a list of the things we are missing, but I would stress the tremendous assets we have in this region. We have an incredible bedrock of success; so many assets that are unique here, like our rich academic environment. So many things are working and are not broken.

A very big part of the job is to tell the stories that we don’t know about; it’s about the way we learn to talk with each other. It is all about collaboration.

In doing that – conversing publicly to raise awareness of our successes — we need to be much more visual, much more dynamic, better at employing Twitter and blogs and video. We need to learn to be more fluid and transparent, instead of fussing over words in a press release. We need to challenge ourselves to be fresh, with a bias towards more contemporary communications vehicles.

What makes you optimistic about collaboration in Massachusetts?

I’m tremendously enthused by the progress being made the IT collaborative so far.

Do you remember the television ad in the mid-1990s by EDF, a technology firm, which featured weathered cowboys sitting around a campfire, sharing stories and scars about herding cats?

I had my doubts when Gov. Deval Patrick first encouraged the technology community to come together to foster a more collaborative environment to increase the competitiveness of the sector. We don’t all agree on everything, for sure, but it’s the right thing to do. It’s enlightened self-interest. Personally, I’m convinced that Yankee Group as a company will benefit from our collaboration.

What tells me it’s working, what makes me enthusiastic, is that every time we reach out to the next group in the sector, to bring new people into the dialogue, there is a similar enthusiasm. People want to know: How can I get involved? What can I do to help?

Emily Nagle Green is the president and CEO of Yankee Group, the global connectivity experts, and is vice-chairperson of MITX, the region’s premier trade association for digital technology, marketing and media professionals. She serves as a member of the organizing committee of the Massachusetts IT Collaborative.

She has just finished work on a new book, to be published by McGraw-Hill, on the future of communications technology.

Here’s a quick run-down on some of the events happening this week in MA that might be of interest to you. Please let us know by commenting on the page, emailing or tweeting about other events the Innovate MA Tech community should know about. We will post a summary each week.

Wednesday August 12

VC Entrepreneurship Smackdown - Mass Biotechnology Council

We will explore the current financing landscape, pursue novel tactics for getting that coveted first date with the VC (and have him keep his Blackberry on “vibrate only” mode), understand the metrics for business plans that grab attention and dollars, debate those predatory preferred terms that VCs love to engineer, and understand ways in which communications between entrepreneurs and investors can be improved.

http://www.masshightech.com/calendar.html

Boston Networking Club Cocktail Party

Join the Boston Networking Club at our monthly networking event series. Bring friends or the company for a fun summer outing. Enjoy a night of networking, cocktails, and very light hors d’oeuvres. Bring lots of business cards! This event is geared towards professionals 20s, 30s and 40s+…looking to network and socialize with other like minded people in a fun, upscale environment.

http://www.masshightech.com/calendar.html