Wanted: A new identity

State, industry leaders in effort to rebrand technology sector

The consensus among a group trying to rebrand the state's technology image was that the Route 128 moniker has grown stale. (The Boston Globe/File 1982)

The state technology industry is having an identity crisis.

Companies like Wang Laboratories and Digital Equipment Corp., which defined Massachusetts in its high-tech heyday, are gone. Most of the dot-coms that once promised new life have fizzled. And a crop of start-ups in emerging fields like robotics, computer games, and mobile communications, have yet to attract widespread attention.

"There's a new generation of interesting technology stuff that's happening here," said Greg Bialecki, who was recently named Massachusetts secretary of housing and economic development. "But it doesn't seem to have gotten the same spontaneous recognition as the old 128 brand or [California's] Silicon Valley brand."

So like a fading beauty hoping to recapture some glamour, the Massachusetts high-tech sector is preparing for a makeover. Eighteen industry captains, government officials, and academic figures gathered at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge last week to organize a public-private effort under the name Information Technology Collaborative. Their goal is to rebrand and strengthen a business sector that's historically driven the state's economy, participants said.

The consensus was that the Route 128 moniker, which defined Massachusetts in the glory days of minicomputers, has grown stale. And the Dot Commonwealth, an industry bid to recast the state's image during the dot-com era, never took hold and is no longer relevant. The desired new brand would reflect the sector's expansion into new technology niches, while also promoting its role as an enabler of cutting-edge industries such as energy and life sciences.

"We're seeing the emergence of a new economic base within the technology sector," suggested Joyce Plotkin, the president of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. She cited growing fields such as cloud computing, open source software, and e-health.

Many of the Massachusetts firms in these niches are relatively small start-ups backed by venture capital. Others are divisions of larger companies based out of state. Most of the biggest state-based technology companies, such as Hopkinton data storage provider EMC Corp., sell their products to other businesses and lack the cachet among consumers of Silicon Valley brands like Google Inc., eBay Inc., and Apple Inc.

Some Massachusetts technology leaders privately grumbled that Governor Deval L. Patrick neglected the industry early in his term while pressing initiatives to grow the smaller biotechnology and clean energy sectors. In the past two weeks, however, the governor met with dozens of high-tech executives at the State House and toured the Cambridge Innovation Center, a start-up incubator, before departing with Bialecki for a tour of West Coast technology centers.

While it didn't result in immediate commitments by outside technology companies to expand here, their weeklong trip to Seattle, Portland, Ore., and the San Francisco Bay Area was "about building relationships," Patrick said in an interview. "This is about tomorrow. It's not just about today."

The new state technology collaborative, which the Patrick administration is working to form, will be similarly future-oriented. "They got off the plane and immediately reached out to Massachusetts companies," said Mark Horan, executive director of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, a trade group for telecommunications and networking businesses. "The governor seems to be on a mission to help bolster this part of the tech economy."

Beyond the broad agreement on the need to update the Massachusetts technology image, however, few concrete ideas emerged at the session to organize the collaborative. The only participant to offer a specific proposal for a new brand was Mohamad Ali, vice president and senior state executive for IBM Corp., who suggested "the Innovation Hub" as a starting point for discussion on how to reposition the Massachusetts technology sector's identity.

Ali, whose company develops chips for supercomputers and computer games, said, "The kind of processors we're developing here rival anything that's built on the planet. Massachusetts is one of the few places with that kind of talent."

Participants haven't determined whether to hire an outside marketing firm to work on the rebranding, how much to spend on the effort, or how to pay for it. They even debated whether the name Information Technology Collaborative - which conjures up computer servers in data centers - was appropriate for the group that will oversee the rebranding. Bialecki, citing the 200 wireless, 80 robotics, and 70 computer game companies in Massachusetts, said the term "digital technology" might better reflect the breadth of the state's technology sector today.

Donna C. Cupelo, the Boston-based regional president of Verizon New England, said the branding exercise is part of a larger push to prepare the state's technology industry for a new era. For the first phase, a public-private partnership, including the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's John Adams Innovation Institute, has ponied up $150,000 to study the economic impact of the technology sector.

"When the economy recovers, we want to make sure people view Massachusetts in its current dimension, not what it was in the past," said Cupelo, who cochaired a study group that led to the current effort. "It has to be something that communicates growth and innovation in a way that's understood to the public here and in the world beyond."

Some doubt the effectiveness of a marketing slogan, as opposed to a name arising organically, the way Route 128 or Silicon Valley seemed to do. And they question whether a campaign to come up with a catch phrase that captures today's amorphous industry will distract from the more important work of building new technology businesses.

"It's not what you call it, it's where it goes from here," said Howard Anderson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in Cambridge and a former venture capitalist. "They can call it anything they want, and it doesn't matter. . . . The one and only real asset we still have here is the Yankee brain."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.