Summers: Innovation is still key to area's future

Greater Boston can succeed and prosper in the expanding global economy only if it holds onto its position as an "innovation community," former Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers told Massachusetts high-technology executives yesterday.

The larger role of China, India, and Russia in world markets, and in the technology industry, will require Massachusetts companies to become more agile in striking alliances and expanding their reach, Summers said.

He also said the US government needs to invest more heavily in science and technology education.

"In this economy, our strength is going to have to derive from where it's derived from in this area for a very long time: our capacity to innovate," Summers told about 300 people gathered at the Boston Sheraton for his keynote speech to the spring meeting of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Technology leaders from China, India, and Russia also addressed the meeting.

Summers, who served as US secretary of the treasury and chief economist of the World Bank in the 1990s, predicted the rapid expansion of the developing world will be judged by historians as "the first and most important story" of this era.

China alone has been growing by about 7 percent a year, doubling its economic output in a decade, while its standard of living is rising 100-fold within a lifespan, he said.

"This is an event without precedent in human history," he said. "The Industrial Revolution was slower, and it was narrower."

New players in the global economy also have been making "formidable" investments in science and engineering, Summers said, even as the US commitment to those disciplines has waned.

"The precise quality of the students can be argued," he suggested, "but it cannot be argued that China and India between them will turn out 10 times as many engineers as the United States will."

Summers said it will be especially important for US companies, universities, and regions to stay on the cutting edge of technology, medical research, and applied sciences. "The leaders will always be the ones who are one step ahead of the next capacity," Summers said. "And they will be the ones that prosper."

Regions such as Greater Boston and Silicon Valley attract larger numbers of talented immigrants than elsewhere in the United States because they're on the leading edge of innovation, Summers said.

"Ultimately, our ability to prosper and succeed will depend on creating communities of innovation," he contended. "And these communities will benefit not only the innovators but those who are proximate to the innovators. Would you rather be looking for a job in a restaurant in the Boston area or a restaurant in the Cleveland area?"

Summers referred only obliquely and humorously to his stormy five-year presidency at Harvard, where he frequently clashed with faculty members upset by his outspoken comments. He resigned in 2006 after touching off an uproar at an academic conference by suggesting innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and mathematics.

"People would ask me, 'Well, how's it different to be president of Harvard than to be secretary of the treasury?"' Summers recalled yesterday. "And in those first months I gave an answer that, in retrospect, is almost breathtaking in its naivete. I said, 'Washington's so political . . . at a university, everybody's on the same team singing Kumbaya, trying to work together.'

"It's not precisely the same I answer I would give today."

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