BOSTON--It didn't take long for the audience to catch on that Michael E. Porter, Christensen professor of business administration, doesn't usually lecture at Roxbury Community College.

Although the world-renowned guru of corporate management was in the neighborhood to discuss the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), his effort to rebuild troubled urban areas, the local audience greeted with skepticism the erudite scholar who seemed to have all the answers.

"I was afraid that he was going to be lynched," recalled Luis Soto, an inner-city businessperson now working with Porter.

Despite initial setbacks, the nonprofit ICIC now appears to have begun bridging the cultural gap separating the Harvard Business School's (HBS) leafy Allston campus from the struggling Roxbury start-ups it seeks to help.

Started in 1994, the Boston-based ICIC uses research and consulting to encourage companies to construct and improve enterprises in the inner city.

As of December, it served 20 clients, ranging from a fish-processing plan to the Boston Bank of Commerce, New England's only blackowned, full-service commercial bank. The ICIC also has elicited the financial support of such corporate giants as McDonald's Corp. and Citicorp.

The initiative originally stirred excitement among scholars and local activists alike with its emphasis on empowering inner-city entrepreneurs and creating much-needed jobs in economically deprived neighborhoods.

"We must stop trying to cure the inner city's problems by perpetually increasing social investment and hoping for economic recovery to follow," Porter wrote in a 1995 article in the Harvard Business Review.

"Instead, an economic model must begin with the premise that inner-city business should be profitable and positioned to compete on a regional, national and even international scale," he wrote.

That initial enthusiasm, however, was tempered by the difficulties of combining elite consulting techniques with the bread-and-butter realities of the struggling inner-city economy.

In what staff members are calling "a decided evolution," over the past six months the ICIC has refocused its priorities and refined its methods.

The realignment in the group's strategies seems to be paying off.

"I'm much, much more encouraged than I have been in the fast five years," says James Miller, chief executive officer of AB&W Engineering, a Dorchester-based supplier for the nation's major auto makers.

A New Angle

Although some say that the ICIC has little conception of life in the inner city, most agree that Porter has introduced a revolutionary new approach to dealing with the problems in America's troubled urban environments.