What: Cambridge Innovation Center.

Where: One Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When: No deadline for applications as the program is ongoing.

Who: Entrepreneurs looking to work surrounded by high-level university research in a space surrounded by other innovative companies.

Why: To gain access to other entrepreneurs working in disciplines from biotech to information technology, and to work in close quarters with venture capital firms.

How: Get more information at the Cambridge Innovation Center website. Cost per person ranges from $250 to $799.

Some incubators are all about the contest and the money: You submit your business plan, hope for a little seed capital and mentoring, then pitch to venture capitalists and snag more funding or wash out.

The Cambridge Innovation Center is different. Across the street from the campus at MIT, and with a view of Harvard, the innovation center is about the space. Oh, and the products and companies it has spawned—from biotechs and clean energy to one of the most important mobile-computing platforms on the market today.

“We are a city of entrepreneurship,” says Tim Rowe, director of the Innovation Center, founded in 1999 and encompassing about 150,000 square feet.

Google chose the location to develop its Android mobile-phone platform, starting with one person, and later growing to cover an entire floor of the office tower before moving into a Massachusetts office of its own.

“They wanted a place that was creative,” Rowe says. So they chose a place within shouting distance of the two biggest-spending research universities in the world (between them, Harvard and MIT spend $4 billion a year on research, Rowe said).

Companies can get space ranging from a seat at a library-style long table to desks to offices, with prices ranging from $250 per person per month for space at a table to $790 for a private office.

Rowe said the biggest selling point for the center is the exposure it gives entrepreneurs to one another.

With about 400 companies ranging in size from one person to 20 people and beyond, across a range of disciplines, the Innovation Center stands as a magnet for promising companies.

He said vetting of companies that want to take space at the center is relatively light, with managers of the center checking the backgrounds of would-be entrepreneurs, but without the kind of competitive business-plan battles that some other incubators demand.

“We don’t seek to evaluate their business idea. Even the best venture capitalists only get that right a fraction of the time,” he said.

But there have been companies with successful sales and those that have drawn serious funding from venture capitalists.

The largest exit for a company from the Innovation Center was that of Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, which sold to Celgene Corp. for $640 million in 2009.

Great Point Energy, a company focusing on turning coal into natural gas, has drawn the largest amount of funding, hauling in more than $150 million by the beginning of 2010 from venture capitalists like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures, as well as Peabody Energy and Dow. Marketing-software-platform company Hub Spot raised $65.5 million from venture capitalists including Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital. In all, companies at the Cambridge Innovation Center raised more than $1.1 billion in venture capital since 2001.

“These are serious companies doing serious things,” Rowe said.

Naturally, with such companies around, the center has also become a magnet for the Boston area’s venture capitalists. Highland Capital is moving its headquarters to the building. Early-stage investors DFJ New England Fund and New Atlantic Ventures are both located in the center. Apple Tree Ventures, Bain, Northbridge, and Flybridge all host space in the building.

That concentration of venture capitalists, too, is different from many other incubators, which tend at least in the beginning to be sponsored by a few angel investors or venture capitalists.

“It’s an open platform as opposed to a one-fund thing,” Rowe said.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com