What makes Boston in a league of its own

AS I FLY to Boston from my new home outside Los Angeles, a chart in the Sunday New York Times shows the large numbers of cities across America that are hurting and losing jobs. One of the few exceptions: Boston.

At a time of contraction and confusion bordering on panic, Boston stands out. While it is not immune to the effects of the financial crisis or declining revenues in government, there's something about Boston that seems to place it in a league of its own.

There's an old saying that the three favorite pastimes in Boston are sports, politics, and revenge - and not necessarily in that order. And with mob trials, successful sports teams, and the flood of political commentary flowing out of Boston, perhaps there is a comparative advantage from being so competitive, passionate, and personal.

Today marks the launch of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, a new institute at MIT devoted to harnessing technology and innovation to curb poverty and to promote entrepreneurship throughout the world. Innovations like this probably do more to explain what makes Boston different - and successful - than all the corruption trials, Super Bowls, and political consultants combined. The real business of the city is ideas.

Think of all its firsts. The first public school. The first college. The first bank. The first public library. The first telephone. The first use of ether. The first subway. The first mutual fund and the first venture capital fund. The first safety razor and the first instant camera. Firsts that transformed the world.

In trying to explain this to a neighbor in California, I said simply, "there must be something in the soil back in Boston." The neighbor asked how the the long winters and frozen ground could possibly provide nutrients for innovation.

Maybe that explains it - perhaps the long, barren winters are the mothers of invention. How could the Pilgrims possibly create their "city on a hill" and become a beacon to all mankind if they didn't quickly apply some Yankee ingenuity to what otherwise was a pretty bleak place, largely devoid of natural resources? Maybe the notion of stewardship and common wealth helped Bostonians to think they needed, more than others, to look out for each other, or that the only way to leave things better for the next generation would be to invent something of enduring value.

Or maybe Boston is best explained as motive combined with opportunity: the need to constantly innovate, invent, and reinvent has long been tied in Boston to resources (both intellectual and financial) and a community that exists largely to nurture and protect that powerful combination.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, was the first to understand that we live in a knowledge economy. Drucker might have seen Boston today as the equivalent of a factory of the future, where smart people use their minds, fueled by investors who match ideas with market needs, producing green, clean, and sustainable products for the world.

Drucker also said that "the best way to predict the future is to create it." Boston's been creating the future for four centuries. The Legatum Center at MIT, founded by Iqbal Quadir, a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur, is just the latest version and incarnation of Edwin Land (Polaroid) or Paul Revere (patriot, who also was the first public health commissioner in America) or Alan Khazei (who co-founded City Year). Dreamers and doers, pioneers and inventors, taking risks, sounding the alarm, harnessing technology - and potentially changing the world.

Why Boston? It remains the right place at the right time, and, yes, even with the right soil.

Ira A. Jackson is dean of the Drucker School of Management, the business school at the Claremont Colleges in California. A native Bostonian, he was Massachusetts commissioner of revenue, associate dean of the Kennedy School, and an executive at BankBoston.