Today was breakfast with Bill Aulet, Director of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Centre (pictured left).
Bill epitomizes the environment that exists between academia and the business community at MIT. He is a highly accomplished business leader with a 25-year track record of success, having raised over $100 million in funding for his companies and has directly created hundreds of millions of dollars in market value. Bill currently applies his knowledge and experience to help students, new ventures, and established firms associated with MIT become more successful.
We discussed ways in which we could transfer elements of the MIT programme to Wales and given the fact that the Welsh Assembly Government has just launched its own public sector driven strategy for encouraging enterprise in young people, this may be a useful counterpoint.
We then had a meeting with the Deshpande Center, which was established at the School of Engineering (the best in the World) to increase the impact of MIT technologies in the marketplace by providing grants to take innovative research and guidance to help it reach the marketplace. Since 2002, The Deshpande Center has funded more than 80 projects with over $9 million in grants. 18 projects have spun out of the center into commercial ventures, having collectively raised over $140 million in outside financing.
Again, a project that could be easily transferred into Welsh universities.
In the afternoon, we met with Sherwin Greenblatt, Director of the MIT Mentor Venturing Service (MVS) which supports innovation and entrepreneurial activity throughout the MIT community by matching prospective entrepreneurs with skilled volunteer mentors.
Sherwin was a great character and an inspiration. Now 70 years old, he retired from Bose Corporation in 2002, where he was the first employee of Dr. Amar Bose, his former professor at MIT. As a project engineer, he worked on the early development of Bose high fidelity loudspeakers and related electronic systems. As the company grew, he held the positions of chief engineer, director of engineering, executive vice president and, for 15 years, president. He was an advocate for the volunteer ethos which drives MVS and which has helped to create an important part of the MIT enterprise ecosystem. Again, we were encouraged to work with MIT to set up something similar in Wales.
Finally, we had a tour of the world famous MIT Media Lab, which applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities.
Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work atelier-style, conducting more than 350 projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future. Lab researchers foster a unique culture of learning by doing, developing technologies that empower people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all societies, to design and invent new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
To put it bluntly, it was one of the most amazing places I have experienced in my life with all sort of new innovations being developed in front of my eyes. For example, look at the video below about the personal robots research team and you will see what I mean
I would love to bring more companies from Wales over here to experience, for themselves, the endless opportunities that can be made real and to open their minds to the future.
