MIT: commercializing inventions

Ken Morse of MIT's Entrepreneurship center spoke at the iNano Centre  at Uni of Aarhus (DK) on 4 April 2006. MIT's impressive history of spinning off and starting up business from research goes more than 100 years (Arthur D. Little, Gillette, Campbell Soups) and have more recent names, such as Intel, Genentech, Bose, 3M . The Entrepreneurship Centre is a recent establishment and has made an impressive growth over the last 10 years. (visit their web to learn more Click here )

Morse was there to present the MIT experience. Could MIT's experience be transferred to Aarhus, Denmark, Europe? I don't think Morse cares as much about this as do the Danes. Many European countries are looking for models to emulate - and why not learn from the best?

Morse is a witty, sharp speaker delivering the points from MIT anecdotically - you can get most of the points from the web site. It was an enjoyable evening.

In general, I believe we cannot transfer much from MIT, because the history, the funding situation, the culture and so on and so on are so different. But Morse made some really interesting points, which are universal to my mind.

I was there and had brought my small video camera and have made a few clips of the most interesting points. The clips are socalled podcasts and my podcast site has the address PodPrivate if you search iTunes and you wish to subscribe. If you have a video iPod you can watch the 5 clips on your way to work on the train or in the airport).

Technical insert: Go to Apple's free iTunes page, download the free software and then search the Music Store for a Podcast called PodPrivate. Click here to get the clips using your RSS Reader.   If you wish to just download  Click here  to visit the server via your browser and download the clips as mp4-files.

I noted down 5 points worth remembering:

Point 1: Successful MIT spinoff teams have at least one business person onboard. 80% of "science solo" teams failed. (Back in the 90s I made some case studies of successful Danish innovators: same story.)

Point 2: Don't go far to get the business leads for an invention. As a rule the inventors know them (but you may have to drag it out of them, because they often don't know that they know, I could add as my experience. In the PodPrivate site, I have made an interview with a Spanish scientist concerning a new nanophotonic invention they made, which demonstrates that point).

Points 3: The skills of the tech transfer officer: A Networking Animal; Not an academic; a workaholic; doziastic, smart, thoughtful. (I wonder, which European universities can honour such skills in terms of remuneration? In my view European universities should "gang up" by region, nation or sector, outsource their TOs to give elbow room to these skillful staff members)

Point 4: The best inventions seldom become applied in fields, which the inventor thought of from the outset. How to deal with this dilemma? Make parties! Present inventions at pizza-beer etc parties; invite business people for informal "meetings".  (Goodbye old Technology push-Technology pull discussion! Welcome to Technology Catering ;- I have made a course about why this is so and what we can do: called Communicating TOPs Click here to read more )

Point 5: Universities could learn that Equity is better than Royalty - for the survival of the start-up company. 

Author: Max

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[NTIC]

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