Public Innovation Trail Tour in Cambridge

CIC Cambridge @ 245 Main

Check out the Start-Up Hub (CIC), formerly the Cambridge Incubator, founded by MIT Business School graduate Tim Rowe.

MIT Museum

Reopened in OCtober of 2022 the MIT Museum showcases the Institutes place on the cutting edge of tech advancement.

The Cambrige office of Google, learn about the city's relationship with tech giants, and the creativity to come out of these doors, like Android

Stata Center

Inside the Stata Center at MIT are labs focused on computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics (they gave birth to iRobot Corp., maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner), and a small, ground-floor exhibit about student “hacks,” or pranks, through the years.

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard seeks to better understand the roots of disease and narrow the gap between new biological insights and creating impact for patients.

Cambridge

The Human Genome Project at the Whitehead Institute. The Whitehead Institute was created in 1982 by philanthropist Jack Whitehead and David Baltimore, an MIT professor and Nobel Prize winner. A key part of the vision was assembling a supergroup of the world’s top biomedical researchers in one building, and eliminating “virtually any impediment to their pursuit of scientific discovery,” supplying ample funding and the most sophisticated lab equipment, but limited bureaucracy. (It’s an independent nonprofit affiliated with MIT.)

225 Binney St

Biogen, the Biotech Trailblazer, Hear about its founding, by two Nobel Prize winners, and its history of Innovation.

Meet the Internet Accelerator, Akamai. The start-up's original idea was to set up a network of servers around the world to cache, or store, content closer to where people wanted to access it—making everything show up faster on web browsers. Some of the company’s first successful large-scale demonstrations, in 1999, involved the delivery of a movie trailer for “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and ESPN’s March Madness college basketball coverage.

Draper

Walk down Broadway and take a left at Technology Square. At 555 is Draper Labs, where you’ll see a giant moon hanging in the lobby. Among its greatest achievements are the guidance computers that enabled Apollo spacecraft to successfully travel to and land on the moon. One of the software developers who wrote the code that ran these guidance computers was Margaret Hamilton, who later founded two companies and is credited as one of the people who defined the field of “software engineering.”

Moderna

Founded in 2010 to explore the potential of modified RNA molecules (hence the name “mod-RNA”) to treat diseases or serve as a vaccine.

LabCentral

At one time home to Davenport Car Works, Walworth Manufacturing Company, Polaroid and today, LabCentral, Few buildings have housed so many inovators over the course of their lifetime.

810 Main St

here were also at one point 66 different candy companies in Cambridge, making everything from candy hearts for Valentine’s day to Squirrel Nut Zippers to lemon drops. (The Fig Newton cookie was also invented in Cambridge, in 1891—even though they were named for the nearby city of Newton.) This building is the last operating candy factory in Cambridge, owned by Tootsie Brands. The company unfortunately doesn’t offer tours, in part because candy companies are notoriously secretive about the equipment and processes they use to make candy—“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” wasn’t too far off base. Inside, they make 26 million pieces of candy a day. Why is that number so high? The factory is the only place in the world that Sugar Babies and Junior Mints are made—both of which are small little morsels.

The Innovation Trail

The Innovation Trail is a way to experience, learn about, and be inspired by four centuries of world-changing breakthroughs from Boston. It focuses on the history of science, medicine, entrepreneurship, and technology in Boston and Cambridge.