Bonkers in Boston Part 2 - MIT and Code for Boston

So this is a rundown of the the second part of my trip to Boston recently to check out some of uni innovation and entrepreneurship programs at MIT and Harvard. See Bonkers in Boston Part 1 for Harvard and Virginia Tech article.

I was trying to get in touch with some people at MIT Media Lab without much luck and came across a guy called Dazza on LinkedIn who I thought might be Australian. After all Shazza, Gazza, Dazza doesn’t get much more Australian than that... Dazza Greenwood is a lecturer and research scientist from MIT Media Lab and turns out he spent a year in Australia and had an office in UTS tower building where he worked on networked systems. It turned out to be no mean feat to track down Dazza but through dogged perseverance I managed to meet him at the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and talked about blockchain, sovereign identity, living in Sydney and the need to build global civic infrastructure independent of corporations - just the usual.

It was a lucky circumstance that the Code for Boston group were meeting on the same night that I met Dazza at the CIC and he introduced me to a few of the people there. I decided to stay for the meeting and find out a bit more about it. I didn’t know a lot about Code for America and was really impressed by this chapter in Boston. There were about 20 or 30 people turned up to work on a variety of civic apps and projects as volunteers. So it turns out there is also a Code for Australia group based in Melbourne that has been running for about 18 months. They run a Civics Lab and Fellowships program and are looking at setting up something in Sydney.

The next day I visited MIT SENSEable City Labs and spoke with Erin Baumgartner the Assistant Director. SENSE able City Labs program spun out from MIT Media Lab and focuses on using big data to shape urban environments and make cities more liveable, sustainable and community friendly. They have a good working model of membership where organisations and companies sign up for 3 years to be a core member then can also sponsor research in on particular theme or subject area. The researchers have a high level of autonomy to pursue their research in innovative directions and ultimately the members benefit for their association and IP generated from the research process. They have some really cool projects like this one Hubcap where they had access to data of 170 million taxi rides across NYC used to analyse the potential for taxi ride sharing. Or Underworlds which analyses the sewerage and waste water from parts of the city to analyse public health and behaviour.

The main student entrepreneurship programs at MIT are run through the MIT Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship which has a nice open plan building where any MIT students can drop in and spend time and work on their ideas. I was shown around by the lovely Renee Lawlor Programs Coordinator. They have a series of regular speaker events in the space for students interested in entrepreneurship as well as academic courses and electives.

MIT Martin Trust Entrepreneurship Center

MIT Martin Trust maker space

There are two main student entrepreneurship programs run out of Martin Trust Center; the 4 week StartIAP program which is an 4 week introductory program and the longer GFSA 3 month accelerator program.

The StartIAP program runs during January in the Independent Activities Period (IAP) is open to any students and introduces students to entrepreneurship and startups. The MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator (GFSA) is the main student ventures accelerator at MIT. It runs over 3 months of summer from June to August and there were 17 teams just kicking off when I visited.

Teams working in GFSA Accelerator program

Each team has about 7 people on it and has a nominated ‘board’ of 3-5 experienced coaches and entrepreneurs. Each week the team has access to a $2,000 stipend if they meet the milestones and criteria set out for them and can access up to $20,000 over the course of the program. The program is based on Bill Aulet’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship process. Bill is the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The teams are largely graduate student (or post-grads as we would call them here) doing masters and phd degrees with some undergrads. The teams do a final pitch at MIT and in New York and San Francisco.  

They also have a cool program for high school students called MIT Launch Summer which has a free 9 week online course LaunchX and school clubs program. Each summer a group of 30 teenagegs from US and around the world come together to do a Launch meetup and program.

An interesting thing about the Martin Trust Center is that the accelerator programs are run coordinated and run by 4 Entrepreneurs in Residence who also provide coaching for the teams. They also have a range of prizes and fellowships available including at $100k Entrepreneurship Competition.

A couple of other people I was keen to catch up with MIT were the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the MIT Center for Civic Media I didn’t manage to get onto anyone from Civic Media but I did meet with Robert Laubacher from Center for Collective Intelligence who works with Tom Malone on a range of trandisciplinary projects around crowd based innovation. There is an annual Collective Intelligence conference which was held at Stern Uni this year which covers a range of themes including biological models, organisational students and technology approaches to collective intelligence.

Robert and his team have been developing a platform for collective problem solving called Solve which they use to run a series of challenges aiming to generate creative solutions to big problems through the intelligence of the crowd. There is a regular yearly meetup called HUBweek They are also setting up an initiative with the government in Singapore using the platform for ‘future scanning’ for new trends and ideas.

Robert suggested this article in the Atlantic by Ethan Zucherman on The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People’s Problems

Welcome touchscreen for labs at MIT Media Lab

And last but by no means least I did get to visit the legendary MIT Media Lab with Dazza kindly taking me on a tour. So this really is next level the labs are so well set up and equiped with top of the range gear. There are about 25 labs including lifelong kindergarten, the future of opera and biomechatronics just to name a few. Each lab is headed up by a professor and works with a range of researchers and postgrads.

The Media Lab seems to operate fairly autonomously in relations to the rest of the uni and I got the impression is viewed as being a bit self focused. This seems to be constant challenge for innovation teams in large organisations; how to remain accessible and not appear to be elite while at the same time having the independence to do different and challenging projects. Dazza credits the set up and to some degree success of the lab to the way it was set up by Nicholas Negroponte who navigated they bylaws of the university to ensure some independence. The fact that they are primarily industry funded, again with a multi year membership model also helps with this independence and ability to be responsive and flexible.

The mission of the Media Lab is stated below

"At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In a world where radical technology advances are taken for granted, Media Lab researchers design technologies for people to create a  better future.

Now, as it approaches its 30th anniversary, the MIT Media Lab is focusing on “human adaptability”—work ranging from initiatives to treat conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression, to sociable robots that can monitor the health of children or the elderly, to the development of smart prostheses that can mimic—or even exceed—the capabilities of our biological limbs."

I was expecting there would be a high level of security but you could just come in and jump into a lift up to a floor each of which have an open eating/sitting/play area with the labs around the outside. We visited a couple of labs including the robotics lab Polly Guggenheim at the Personal Robotics Group They are working on a lot of robot toy prototypes for mental and physical health and do user testing with children in the lab.

Images from MIT Media Lab Personal Robotics Group

And that's all folks - until next trip