Douglas Hart, MIT Professor and entrepreneur
Another early start in MIT for the R and D conference but with a stellar cast of presenters looking at the world of innovation.
This what we listened to this morning:
8:30 a.m. Michael Cusumano - Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World (Lessons from Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, Toyota, and More)
9:15 a.m. Mark Mortensen - Moving Beyond Team: The Changing Nature of Collaboration in Modern Work
10:30 a.m. Douglas Hart - From Academic to Entrepreneur
11:00 a.m. Eugene Fitzgerald - Inside Real Innovation
11:30 a.m. Botaro Hirosaki - R&D Management of NEC to Challenge the New Innovation Paradigm
Michael Cusumano’s lecture was fascinating as it looked to how services are becoming increasingly important to innovative companies, using information technology companies such as IBM as examples.
Mark Mortensen’s inspirational talk on teams made me seriously rethink how organizations in Wales should be managed. I certainly need to rethink the way that the Global Academy is organised (again!). In particular he mentioned Google’s 20 per cent free time concept, which can be used to develop new ideas. How many companies in Wales would allow their organisation to do that?
Maybe I should look to trial this in the New Year?
The presentation by Douglas Hart on how he built his spinout company through the various MIT entrepreneurial initiatives was both inspirational and informative. In particular, his comment on failure was most illuminating “In the USA, you can fail thirteen times and they wills till give you money for the fourteenth time if you have a great idea”. Compare that to the culture in Wales where failure is not only not tolerated, but seen as stigma that the individual has to bear.
Gene Fitzerald’s talk on innovation systems in the USA gave some great insight on how we could grow our economies out of recession and Boratko Hirosaki showed us how a large company such as NEC is innovating.
There must be a way to get our leading companies to learn from such experts at MIT. Is there a way to get some of the millions of pounds of leadership and management funding to bring some of our entrepreneurial leaders here to Massachusetts for their key programmes? Another challenge when I get back!
Then this afternoon was the real deal.
First of all, we went to meet the creators of the Fab Lab concept. Fab Labs provide widespread access to modern means for invention. They began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). CBA assembled millions of dollars in machines for research in digital fabrication, ultimately aiming at developing programmable molecular assemblers that will be able to make almost anything. Fab Labs fall between these extremes, comprising roughly fifty thousand dollars in equipment and materials that can be used today to do what will be possible with tomorrow's personal fabricators.
Fab labs are based all over the World and now we want to bring the concept to Wales. In fact, we impressed Prof Neil Gershenfeld the founder of Fab Lab so much that he wants to work with us to bring the FabLab to help young people within some of our more deprived communities (Y Lab Fab!). See the video below to see what it has done elsewhere and consider what this can do for kids with great ideas but no facilities to put them into practice.
Finally, at the evening event for all the participants at the conference, we shook hands with MIT Portugal to set up a new collaborative group consisting of ILP members from Wales, Scotland, Catalonia, Portugal and Brazil, where we would work together and share experiences.
A great day all round for Wales and now I am going to bed!
