The Idea Without a Name
How Labs-as-a-Service, Co-Working Labs, and Managed Research Centers All Missed What We Were Really Building
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. Reporters and investors reached for familiar buckets. In 2016 the Boston Globe introduced me as “chief encouragement officer” and described Mass Innovation Labs as “an incubator of tech firms in Kendall Square,” with our team troubleshooting everything from permits and validation to getting a one ton mass spectrometer safely installed (Globe, 2016). That word, incubator, stuck because it was the closest thing people knew. It was not what we were.
Others labeled us an accelerator. Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council summarized SmartLabs in the context of accelerators at BIO, describing “accelerating incubation” and positioning us beside traditional accelerator programs (NSTC, 2019 item; page updated 2021). A 2019 profile on Medium literally titled us a “life science accelerator,” and then went on to describe pharma grade private labs delivered on demand, modular construction, and 1 to 3 week build times (Medium, 2019). The label made sense from the outside. The description underneath it was closer to the truth.
By 2020 the language began to bend toward the work. The San Francisco Business Journal covered our South San Francisco expansion and used the term right in the headline: “Lab as a Service” (SFBJ, 2020). That captured time and access. Start in weeks, not years. It 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. Business Wire described SmartLabs as a “Laboratory as a Service (LaaS) leader” and announced a $250 million Series B, plus version 4.0 of our laboratory operating system, first introduced in 2016. The text is blunt about the intent: “a total reimagining of a contract research organization that bundles tech enabled lab infrastructure and services without sacrificing intellectual property,” and a software platform, SmartLabs OS, to run it (Business Wire, 2021). Around the same time, headlines and trade press started using the phrase managed research center for our newer sites. Medical Product Outsourcing reported plans to open “an advanced managed research center” at 100 CambridgeSide and even tied it to “Laboratory as a Service” adoption across the market (MPO, 2023).
The physical expression of that idea was visible in Cambridge. Boston.com covered our conversion of the entire third floor of CambridgeSide into laboratory space, a reminder that the platform was as much about adaptive reuse and programmable buildings as it was about operations and software (Boston.com, 2023).
By late 2023, summaries like Yahoo Finance’s “SmartLabs Sets Roadmap for the Future of Science” were describing the national network plainly and focusing on the integrated model rather than the old incubator or accelerator labels (Yahoo Finance, 2023). And by 2025, industry groups were writing about us as a lab infrastructure and services provider that delivers “turnkey, advanced research environments” with in vivo and cleanroom capabilities under one roof (MassBio, 2025).
Looking back, the vocabulary tells the story.
Incubator. Accelerator. Lab as a service. Managed research center. Each term was an attempt to describe the same thing. The companies on our platform defined it faster than the language did. The throughline was consistent. Remove friction. Compress time. Give teams an enterprise grade environment that they can shape without pausing the science.
We were never an incubator in the equity and mentorship sense. We were not a short term accelerator either. We were the connective tissue, the operating layer between scientific ambition and the space where that work happens. Sometimes the hardest part is not building it. It is explaining it.
References
The Boston Globe — “Meet the chief encouragement officer in Kendall Square” and “an incubator of tech firms in Kendall Square” (Feb 23, 2016)
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/02/23/troubleshooter-works-remove-pain-points-for-kendall-square-biotechs/vAHZeJwezOQKh9RW9KlGTL/story.html
San Francisco Business Journal — “Lab as a Service: SmartLabs Expands at Genesis Campus” (Mar 3, 2020)
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2020/03/03/lab-as-a-service-smartlabs-genesis-phase-3.html
Business Wire — “SmartLabs Announces $250 Million Series B and Update of Proprietary Laboratory OS” (Sep 20, 2021)
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210920005187/en/SmartLabs-Announces-%24250-Million-Series-B-and-Update-of-Proprietary-Laboratory-OS
Medical Product Outsourcing — “SmartLabs to Open Advanced Managed Research Center Next Year” (Apr 27, 2023)
https://www.mpo-mag.com/breaking-news/smartlabs-to-open-advanced-managed-research-center-next-year/
Boston.com — “SmartLabs to convert entire third floor of CambridgeSide mall into lab space” (Mar 3, 2023)
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2023/03/03/smartlabs-to-convert-entire-third-floor-of-cambridgeside-mall-into-lab-space/
Yahoo Finance — “SmartLabs Sets Roadmap for the Future of Science” (Aug 23, 2023)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/smartlabs-sets-roadmap-future-science-130000465.html
Medium — “SmartLabs — Life Science Accelerator For Research Scientists” (May 23, 2019)
https://medium.com/the-startup-buzz/smartlabs-26b6323ba9ad
National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan — “MOST Join with Boston-based Accelerator SmartLabs…” (original 2019 item, page updated 2021)
https://www.nstc.gov.tw/folksonomy/detail/bbef2c18-b9e8-482d-a0ab-ff929d4a831a?l=en
MassBio — “Member Spotlight: SmartLabs” (Jun 9, 2025)
https://www.massbio.org/news/member-news/member-spotlight-smartlabs/