Tim Rowe - Founder & CEO - Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC)

Tim Rowe is the founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center, which operates globally, including in Japan. He is an inaugural honoree in The Boston Globe's Tech Power Players 50 list (2022), the recipient of The Margaret Fuller House 2022 Lt. Kinney Award for Exceptional Community Service, a past Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, and a Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree. In 2025, Tim Rowe was recognized with Japan’s Foreign Minister’s Award for his contributions to economic exchange between Japan and the United States.

Would you introduce yourself briefly?

Hi! My name is Tim Rowe. I grew up in the Boston area (Cambridge and Belmont). I visited Japan for the first time as a high school freshman, tagging along on a business trip with my father. I was blown away by what I saw, and that began, as is the case for so many of us, a lifelong love for the country and its culture. I was particularly impressed by the care that the Japanese give to each detail of what they do, from trains that run on time to little details about the food they serve. At my dad’s suggestion, as a junior in high school I studied Japanese at a language school in Harvard Square, and did an internship at his company’s Tokyo office that summer. Things progressed from there. I studied Japanese at Amherst College, and participated in its year-long study abroad program, the Associated Kyoto Program (AKP) at Amherst’s sister school, Doshisha University. I lived with a family for the year, and this deepened my cultural awareness. Upon graduating university, I took a job at Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo, and ended up spending four years there as an analyst in its Technology Strategy Department. I lived in an old “nagaya” (長屋 - wooden traditional home) in Tsukishima, rode a motorcycle around town and around the country, and basically had the time of my life.

Scroll forward to today, I am the founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC). Collectively with an affiliate we co-founded, we run the world’s largest startup hub in a collection of buildings next to MIT in Kendall Square with over 1000 small companies in around half a million square feet. In 2000 we opened our first location in Japan, in Toranomon in Tokyo, in a collaboration with Mori Building, one of Japan’s leading real estate owners. That facility is today Japan’s largest startup hub. 

Seeing an increasing volume of opportunities for engagement between Japan and Boston, a decade ago we formed something called the CIC Japan Desk. Initially just one person, this became a whole team of Japanese-speaking business professionals based here in Boston who specialize in helping our Japanese partners figure out how to set up and do business here in Boston, and vice versa. Through this work, we have had long and warm relationships with the Consulate General of Japan in Boston, as well as the Japan Society of Boston, both of which maintain workspace at CIC.

Tim Rowe with Seitaro Hattori, governor of Fukuoka Prefecture, and Tak Umezawa

You’ve been traveling to Japan since high school, have worked in Japan, and now your company CIC operates in Japan. How do you think your lifelong experiences in Japan have shaped you as a leader?

While it certainly sounds like a cliché, Japan’s “long term” focus has been an inspiration for me. CIC is 26 years old this year, and I still feel that is a “blink of an eye” compared to Japan’s organizations. The oldest continuously operating business in the world, not surprisingly, is Japanese – a construction company in Kyoto. I learned to plan for the long term. 

Another key learning from Japan is the importance of deep relationships in business. It took me seven years to plan and launch our first site there. This dwarfs the time in most other places. And yet I feel as though our work is on a very long term and stable foundation. The importance of developing and investing in deep business relationships has made us stronger everywhere.

Not insignificant is the way in which Japanese architecture has impacted my thinking. My “first real job,” which was at Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo, placed me in a giant room with long rows of shared desks. This was before the notion of “coworking” existed in the United States. At that time, the idea in the US was that “work” required a private office. When I built CIC, I created workspaces designed on the Japanese model, and these became wildly popular, in part because of how efficient they are, but also because of how they promote relationship-building and collaboration. 

The contact we have with other cultures and societies is a gift. I am so grateful to my friends and colleagues in Japan for sharing what makes Japan so special.

Tim Rowe with the mayor of Fukuoka City, Sōichirō Takashima

Like the Japan Society of Boston, it seems that CIC shares a goal of building connections across cultural divides. What lessons have you learned from the challenges of operating CIC cross-culturally in Boston and in Japan?

Doing business between Japan and Boston is characterized by two big gaps: the culture gap and the distance/time-zone gap. The combination is a potent cocktail that will create problems if not properly managed. 

One powerful recipe for dealing with this is actually one I learned from my father, Dick Rowe, who had a Tokyo branch office of his Boston-area firm Faxon. Because communication gaps are so big, the ideal situation is to have BOTH a Westerner who speaks Japanese and a Japanese person who speaks English, on BOTH sides. In our case, our Tokyo office is led by Minako Hirata. She received her MBA from UMass Lowell, and is fluent in English and knows American customs. She is complemented by my colleague Victor Mulas, also based in Tokyo, an expert on innovation ecosystems who joined us from the World Bank. On the Boston side, we have myself, as a Japan-experienced American leader who speaks Japanese, and members of our CIC Japan Desk team who are Japanese as well as non-Japanese who speak Japanese. This “doubled-up communications path” method helps a lot in overcoming the inevitable cultural and communication glitches from long-distance business relationships between Japan and the US. 

The other thing to do, of course, is simply to travel a lot back and forth. My wife and I travel to Japan regularly, and maintain a second home in Tokyo. We spend a month or more in Japan in the spring and fall, and this helps keep us all closely synced.

Under your visionary leadership, CIC has achieved so much success in Japan. You opened CIC Tokyo in 2020, have recently expanded in Fukuoka, and have further expansion in the works. What is your vision for what you’d like to still achieve in the future in Japan?

Some of your readers will know the Venture Café, the weekly entrepreneurs gathering we hold at most of our sites around the world. Our Japan Innovation Nights here in Cambridge, MA can sometimes reach over 800 people in attendance. What people in Boston may not know is that we now have more Venture Café chapters in cities across Japan – seven – than we do in the US. We have also announced our third CIC location in Japan, which will be in Osaka, with a target opening in 2026, and we have more to come. I believe that CIC’s culture of collaboration and entrepreneurship fits well with the Japanese culture, and we look to build a larger, deeper network in Japan over the years.

But beyond being present in Japan, and beyond connecting Japan to the US, as we have for years, I’m also looking forward to doing more to connect Japan to other countries. We run the largest innovation hubs in several other countries as well, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland, and we have a Seoul, Korea and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia hub coming. We look forward to building bilateral ties between all of these places.

We hold the view that innovation fixes the world. And certainly it needs a lot of fixing. One of the great things about innovation is that while it sometimes needs a little nudge to travel across borders, in the long run good ideas lift all boats, and benefit everyone worldwide. I am excited that our work helps open more doors for Japanese innovation to reach the world, and vice versa.

CIC Website