The Idea Without a Name

When we started building what eventually became SmartLabs, we did not have a name for it. We were not trying to invent a new category. We were trying to fix a set of problems that did not fit inside any existing one.

The confusion started with our first name: Mass Innovation Labs. People saw "Mass" and assumed a state initiative, not a scaling private company. In 2016 the Boston Globe introduced me as "chief encouragement officer" and described us as "an incubator of tech firms in Kendall Square." That word, incubator, stuck because it was the closest thing people knew. It was not what we were.

Others labeled us an accelerator. By 2020 the Business Wire used the term right in the headline: "Lab as a Service." That captured time and access, start in weeks, not years, but still missed the core idea. We were not a services vendor. We were rearchitecting the infrastructure layer so the space could change as the science changed.

In 2021, our own release named what had emerged: a "Laboratory as a Service (LaaS) leader," alongside a $250 million Series B and version 4.0 of our laboratory operating system. Around the same time, the phrase managed research center entered use for our newer sites.

Looking back, the vocabulary tells the story. Incubator. Accelerator. Lab as a service. Managed research center. Each was an attempt to describe the same thing. The throughline was consistent: remove friction, compress time, give teams an enterprise-grade environment they can shape without pausing the science. Sometimes the hardest part is not building it. It is explaining it.