Last week, in our usual understated fashion, we here at Xconomy launched a new poll widget. It’s just another in a growing line of features—such as our recent podcasts and News Xpress offerings—that we like to drop into the site to hopefully engage and inform our readers (News Xpress is taking off, but I think we’re still waiting for someone to actually listen to one of our stories).
But back to our poll. We started with a simple question: If you had $10 million to invest in a New England growth cluster, what would you chose (in alphabetical order): biotechnology, clean energy, mobile, robotics, or Web 2.0. And you resoundingly answered (both of you—well, we actually got a fair number of responses) clean energy. A bit over half the votes (51 percent) went to this field, easily trouncing biotech (14 percent), Web 2.0 (14 percent), robotics (12 percent), and mobile (a scant 9 percent).
Which got me thinking…My own gut reaction is that our readers have it wrong. Given the incredible hype around cleantech, and the unknown time to fruition of many of these technologies, there is no way I would sink my precious $10 million in that field. In fact, my own fledgling theory, let’s call it a hypothesis, is that you would do much better if you flopped our survey results completely on their head. Your best payoffs would come first in mobile, then robotics, Web 2.0, biotech, and, lastly, clean energy.
That’s it—I have nothing else to say right now. We’re going to keep the poll up a while longer, both to see if my astute observations change the voting pattern (and also to give us time to think of another question). And if you’ve got a question you’d like to put to your fellow readers, please send it in to [email protected].
