Professor Raiton’s Inside Perspectives: Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Innovation

Georges Doriot helped lay groundwork for 128 tech cluster

By Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe 

Without him, Digital Equipment Corp. might never have gotten started, and the electronics-testing company Teradyne Inc. might not have survived beyond infancy.

He backed an oil rig-manufacturing company run by George H.W. Bush. The current Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman, once worked for his Boston firm. And a half-century ago, he put $50,000 into a company called Ionics Inc. that was trying to find new ways to desalinate seawater; GE bought the company in 2004 for $1.1 billion.

Georges Doriot is the forgotten grandfather of the modern venture capital industry. His Boston firm, American Research and Development, or ARD, helped lay the foundation for the Route 128 technology cluster.

“After World War II, all the textile mills had gone away, and war time production was going away,” says Spencer Ante, a Business Week editor who has written a new book on Doriot, “Creative Capital,” that is hitting stores this week. “Doriot and ARD were really trying to revive the New England economy after the war.”

Doriot also played a role in shifting the focus of the US economy, from one that regarded big conglomerates like US Steel as its pillars to one that now lionizes nimble, fast-growing start-up companies like Google. Ripples of Doriot’s influence can still be seen in the local technology and venture capital landscape. “He was one of the great figures of the twentieth century, as much as J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie,” says Ante. In 1921, Doriot, a young veteran of World War I, became the first French-born student to enroll at Harvard Business School. He later joined the faculty, teaching manufacturing strategy.

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