One square mile of Cambridge is now the most concentrated biotech hub on Earth
- Kendall Square: Moderna, Biogen and Novartis all headquartered within blocks
- Built on land NASA abandoned in 1970
- MIT and Harvard sit two miles apart
- The Bay State, 6th to ratify the Constitution (1788)
How Massachusetts’s digital economy grew
Harvard is founded
The oldest institution of higher education in the United States, predating the country itself by 140 years.
From NASA site to the most innovative square mile on Earth
Kendall Square was industrial marshland until 1965, when the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority cleared 42 acres for NASA’s Electronics Research Center. NASA closed the site in 1970 after Nixon canceled the project, and MIT stepped into the vacuum through the 1970s. Biogen’s 1978 founding and 1982 move into the square set the template that Novartis (2002), Takeda (2019) and Moderna (2024) all followed — Boston Consulting Group called it "the most innovative square mile on earth" in 2009, a line Kendall Square’s own association still uses today.
None of it would have worked without the 1977 ordinance: after a planned Harvard recombinant-DNA lab triggered public alarm, Cambridge’s city council spent months in hearings before passing binding safety rules — the first city in the world to formally regulate genetic engineering. Rather than scaring the industry off, clear rules gave biotech firms the confidence to build there.
America’s original tech corridor
Decades before Kendall Square, Route 128 was the country’s first tech corridor — 99 companies by 1957, 1,212 by 1973, earning the nickname "America’s Technology Highway." Digital Equipment Corporation, founded in a 19th-century wool mill in Maynard in 1957, grew into a $14-billion-a-year, 100,000-employee company before Silicon Valley’s microprocessors displaced its minicomputers by the late 1980s. Massachusetts built a real tech region three decades before biotech found Kendall Square.
How Massachusetts businesses buy websites
Kendall Square’s biotech giants get the headlines, but most of Massachusetts’s businesses are the trades and shops serving Boston’s neighborhoods, the suburbs along Route 128, and towns across the rest of the state.
Professional and B2B services
A research-and-biotech economy rewards clarity about exactly what you do.
Trades and home services
Greater Boston is dense and competitive — say plainly which towns you actually serve.
Shops and hospitality
Clear hours and location, readable on a phone, win the quick local search.
How well do you know Massachusetts’s digital economy?
3 quick questions. Get all 3 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.
Massachusetts quiz · 1 of 3
Which consulting firm first called Kendall Square "the most innovative square mile on earth"?
Why FastSites works here
A state that turned a canceled NASA project into the world’s densest biotech cluster understands the value of moving fast on a good foundation. A clear one-page site, live in days, at a published price, is that same instinct for a small business.