Management

Safer Urban Biking–Sloanie Startup’s Goal

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on March 13, 2012

in Alumni Life, Engineering, Management

Brad Geswein SM '11, MBA '11 and Slava Menn MBA '11

Brad Geswein and Slava Menn with the Defender.

Last summer two newly minted Sloan MBAs saw an opportunity to do good and, perhaps, do well. A biking friend had been hit by a car after someone stole his bike light and, as devoted bikers themselves, they wanted to make urban biking safer.

Turns out that bike lights are a safety weakness since frequently they are stolen or forgotten.

Brad Geswein SM ’11, MBA ’11 and Slava Menn MBA ’11 had a solution: the Defender, an LED-bright, energy-efficient light designed to foil thieves.

Bike light resists theft.

Bike light resists theft.

They launched Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries in Cambridge. The prototype for their first product, the Defender, was designed by Ori Levin of Tsor Industrial Design. Once the light is screwed in place on the handlebar, you need a special tool to unlock it. “It’s not designed to be Fort Knox, but it will be the hardest thing to steal off your bike,” they say.

Funding was a challenge that they met through Kickstarter, which bills itself as “world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.” Through their pitch on Kickstarter, they raised more than $50,000 through pre-orders.

Their company Facebook page includes a short video on how their business is continuing to evolve at the Cambridge Coworking Center.

Check out their blog for a funny video on Who’s schematics are better – Slava’s or Brad’s?

 

 

 

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Join Leading Entrepreneurs at the MIT Global Startup Workshop, March 28–30

by Amy Marcott on February 7, 2012

in Learning, Management, Student Life

Guest bloggers: Grad students Terrence Pong and Maria Telleria on behalf of the GSW 2012 team

Want to find out the latest in innovation strategies? Interested in meeting world-renowned entrepreneurs to discuss the startup landscape and your startup ideas? Looking to expand your network on a global scale?

Then the 15th MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) is the conference for you. MIT GSW is the world’s premier workshop dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship and building entrepreneurial ecosystems globally. This year, it will be held in Istanbul, Turkey. MIT students, in conjunction with the MIT Enterprise Forum of Turkey and Turkey’s leading Ozyegin and Sabanci Universities, bring you  three days packed with networking opportunities, discussions led by leading entrepreneurs, and the first-ever Startup Showcase. The workshop brings together over 300 participants from over 70 nations; participants include entrepreneurial leaders, executives, next-generation entrepreneurs, professors, financiers, students, and government officials.

MIT Global Startup Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

The MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) was founded in 1997 when the MIT $50K (now $100K) Entrepreneurship Competition received numerous queries from around the world from organizations interested in starting and improving their own business plan competitions (BPCs). The first MIT GSW was held on campus in March 1998 and brought together an international community committed to launching BPCs to stimulate and nurture entrepreneurship worldwide.

A decade later, having helped grow and mature the BPC community, the MIT GSW expanded its mission to include all aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Today we continue to build stronger, more productive entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world and a diverse and dynamic global support network for entrepreneurs.

How Do Students Pull this Off?

Each year, the all-student GSW team organizes panels to address region-specific challenges over three days. As soon as one conference concludes, preparation gets underway for the next GSW. Through a competitive bidding process, organizations, universities, and governments from around the world make their pitch on how the GSW could help to inspire and foster interest in entrepreneurship in their country. The team then travels to the host country to conduct site visits and meet with the local team.

Once the host country has been chosen, the MIT team focuses on the main issues that impact the entrepreneurial ecosystem in and around the host country. They invite keynote speakers, identify promising young entrepreneurs, and mobilize a growing group of active GSW alumni to make the next conference a success. The content is designed entirely by the student-run team with individual graduate and undergraduate students taking charge of organizing panel sessions, case studies, or networking sessions.

Running the conference exposes the team to wide-reaching experiences that truly live up to the Global Startup Workshop name. In the past, the team has coordinated the conference in South Korea using the local Hangul (Korean) standard keyboards, organized a gala dinner in an ancient Castle in Cape Town, and rubbed elbows with the president of Iceland in the midst of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption.

The theme of the 2012 workshop is Directions for Innovation, and discussions will focus on new technological directions, ways of addressing a global market, and the relationships among entrepreneurs, investors, and supporting organizations. Turkey, situated at the crossroads of civilizations with its own vibrant economy, young population, and a fast-growing consumer market, is poised to be a regional hub for entrepreneurship and investment. Istanbul, spanning East to West, is an inspiring location for this year’s MIT GSW.

Special Application Deadlines

The Startup Showcase is an unrivaled marketing opportunity for startups at all stages and offers attendees the opportunity to highlight their products and services to the entire conference. This is your chance to show your idea to potential customers and investors as well as to receive feedback from fellow entrepreneurs. Applications for a spot in the Startup Showcase are due Feb. 15.

The GSW fellowship is meant to encourage new entrepreneurs to attend the conference by covering the registration and accommodation costs for up to 10 budding entrepreneurs. Applicants must present a compelling story of how they plan to contribute to entrepreneurial development in their region as well as to the GSW community. Applications are due Feb 8.

 “The 2011 MIT GSW was such a turning point, both for my personal life and for my startup life. During the GSW I participated in the Elevator Pitch Contest, and I was able to pitch my idea to students, entrepreneurs, and VCs from all over the world. The connections I made there led me to apply for the startup accelerator MassChallenge and eventually to launch the first beta version of StyleShare for the international community.” —Jay, South Korea MIT GSW attendee

This year’s confirmed keynote speakers include:

  • Iqbal Quadir  (founder and director, MIT Legatum Center)
  • Guler Sabanci (chairman, Sabanci Holding)
  • Rakesh Malhotra (founder, SAR Group Companies)
  • Hüsnü M. Özyeğin (founder, Finasbank)

Join this unique community, experience the dynamic forum, and help build the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Register today.

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DIY IAP: Tune In to Xconomy on PBS

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 17, 2012

in Economics, Health, In the News, Management

Xconomy has MIT roots. Before starting the business and technology news organization, many key staffers worked and/or graduated from MIT (see below). Their output includes a news website with localized blogs in six major cities, events, and a regular Friday morning update on Boston’s WGBH radio. You can also sign up for their RSS feed or newsletters.

Xconomy online and on air.

Xconomy online and on air.

What stories do they cover? Startups, life sciences, health IT, and clean tech are interest areas. Recent stories include an interview with the CEO of Paris-based biotech giant Sanofi, survey results on tech managers’ salaries for 2011, and Morgenthaler Ventures investments in the fast-growing Silicon Valley startup Evernote.

Localized blogs hail from Boston, Detroit, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Learn about new social media research expansion at Microsoft Research New England (Boston); Walk Score, an online service that ranks rental properties, cities, and neighborhoods by how pedestrian-friendly they are (Seattle); and funding progress for the Kalamazoo, MI-based startup Axonia Medical (Detroit).

Who is Xconomy? Founder Robert Buderi was a research fellow in MIT’s Center for International Studies and served as editor in chief of MIT’s Technology Review, which also published these folks: Cofounder, COO, Executive Editor Rebecca Zacks worked in an MIT neuroscience lab and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Wade Roush PhD ’94 is chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy’s San Francisco bureau. Gregory T. Huang SM ’02, PhD ’99 is national IT editor and editor of Xconomy Boston. Luke Timmerman, a former MIT Knight fellow, is the national biotechnology editor and editor of Xconomy Seattle.

Keep your ear tuned to innovation news at Xconomy.

 

 

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DIY-IAP: Play Platform Wars

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 13, 2012

in Learning, Management

Want to turn a fresh idea about video game platforms into a fabulously successful startup? You’ll need some business savvy to do that. You can start building those skills right now with a free, online simulation offered by the MIT Sloan School of Management—Platform Wars: Simulating the Battle for Video Game Supremacy.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

In this real-time simulation, you play the role of senior management of a video game hardware platform producer with a hot new methodology. You will learn about the dynamics of competition in markets that depend not only on a product’s price and features, but also on how many people own it and how many games and applications are available. You plug in numbers, advance, and see how markets react.

The stakes are high, according to MIT Professor John Sterman PhD ’82, an expert in system dynamics who developed the simulation with colleagues. “The first truly successful video game was PONG, the arcade and home versions offered by Atari,” he says in an introductory video. Atari sales jumped from $100 million a year to $200 billion a year in just a few years in the 1970s largely because of their market dominance.

“Platform wars are not restricted to the Internet world, of course,” Sterman notes. “And important example that is playing out now is the competition to become the new standard for automobiles. We have the competition between the dominant platform of internal combustion engines being powered by gasoline or fossil fuels and that is being challenged by a variety of new contenders including plugin electric vehicles, plugin hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and biofuel types of vehicles. So the lessons you can learn in the simulator are application to a variety of other markets.”

Get Started:

Go the Platform Wars page and watch the Student Instruction Video (26 minutes) and then log in to the Platform Wars simulation itself.

For more business savvy, download the 24-page case study “Sony’s Battle for Video Game Supremacy” by Sterman, Khan Jekarl, Cate Reavis.

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Memorial to Steve Jobs Lingers in Kendall Square

by Amy Marcott on October 12, 2011

in In the News, Management

If you haven’t been to Kendall Square lately, the plaza outside the Marriott hotel has been getting a makeover: new benches, new grassy knoll, new paving—and tiles listing the seven inaugural inductees to the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, which was unveiled Sept. 16. Steve Jobs was among those honored, in addition to Thomas Edison, Hewlett-Packard Cofounders Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Genentech Cofounder Bob Swanson, Bill Gates, and Lotus Development Founder Mitch Kapor.

Memorial to Steve Jobs in Kendall Square

Click to enlarge.

Each inductee gets a granite star on a four-foot by one-and-a-half-foot tile bearing the entrepreneur’s name, title, and one of his inspirational quotes. On Tuesday, apples, flowers, and candles were still seen around Jobs’s star.

The project came to fruition through the collaboration of MIT, the city of Cambridge, the Kauffman Foundation, and several community and private organizations. Read all about it on Xconomy.

Memorial to Steve Jobs in Kendall Square

Learn more about this hall of fame for innovators and why these seven were chosen.
MIT Tech TV

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Thinking About Your Investments?

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on August 8, 2011

in Management

With the recent financial turmoil, many people are thinking about the future of their investments—and what they can do to protect them. You too?

Dow Jones MarketWatch interviewed S.P. Kothari, deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Dow Jones MarketWatch interviewed S.P. Kothari, left, deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Here’s a quick tip from the MIT Sloan Experts blog, a short video featuring S.P. Kothari, deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former Barclays fund manager, who talks about what investors should look for in choosing an investment adviser to steer them through these turbulent markets. He is interviewed by Jonathan Burton, Money and Investment editor for Dow Jones’ MarketWatch in Picking an Investment Adviser in an Unruly Market: S.P. Kothari.

If you can bear more financial insights, here are other recent blog posts:

Low Bank Capital Is Next Fiscal Crisis

The MIT Professor Simon Johnson comments on the lack of adequate capital buffers at banks, which he thinks may become the U.S.’s largest fiscal problem over the next decade.

On China’s growth

Professor Yasheng Huang says foreign investors used to hear about China’s macroeconomic risks—such as concerns about the sustainability of its investment-driven strategy—but little about the actual workings of the Chinese companies. How should they deal now with the news of widespread corporate fraud?

U.S. Corporate Taxes: A Strong Incentive to Move Overseas

MIT Sloan Associate Professor Michelle Hanlon comments on the dilemma facing U.S. companies owning overseas subsidiaries: send the money back to the parent company in the U.S. and pay U.S. corporate taxes? Or avoid the U.S. tax by permanently reinvesting the money abroad?

 

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SDM Blogs: Management-Engineering Insights

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on August 1, 2011

in Engineering, Management

Interested in what’s cooking at the intersection of management and engineering? Tap into student, alumni, and faculty blog posts at System Design and Management, an MIT master’s program for mid-career professionals applying systems thinking to large-scale, complex challenges in product design, development, and innovation. Here are a few excerpts:

Apple's new OS is not a cowardly lion.

Apple's new OS is not a cowardly lion.

SDM graduate student Karl Critz, a technical product manager with a focus on cleantech entrepreneurship, writes First reactions to OS X Lion after living with it for a few days:

“the good

The sleek look created by a lack of scrollbars is awesome. If you’re going to take one good idea from iOS, this is it. Scroller-heavy interfaces like the Finder and iTunes look so much better. The whole look is a lot less cluttered, and the snapping rubber band effect on overscrolling a window is just as much fun on the desktop as it is on a mobile device.…”

Christine Miyachi SM ’86, SM ’01, a software architect, earned master’s degrees in Technology and Policy and in EECS in 1986; she earned a master’s in System Design and Management in 2001. Her blog, titled the Abstract Software Architect, features Why Software Architecture Fails

“I have worked on very old software systems. Some are over twenty years old. Many software engineers I know work on older systems. What happens is subsystems get replaced over times by new subsystems, fundamentally changing the architecture. Sometimes when the architectural decay is so great, the entire system must be replaced.

“Not so in this system I worked on. It is a work horse, as complex as it is now, with hundreds of engineers contributing to it….”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, visiting lecturer of Engineering Systems, identified emerging technologies and marketplace developments critical to the future of the IT industry for IBM for 37 years. He writes about A New Style of Work:

“About a year ago I wrote a blog on the post retirement phase of my life. Tom Foremski, a journalist blogger and friend who reports on the business and culture of innovation in Silicon Valley Watcher, wrote an interesting comment in my blog:

“In some ways, I see your post-retirement life as being somewhat futuristic, in that it will be the way many people will be working in the future. It’s what I call an ‘atomic’ model—collaborating with others on specific tasks/projects and then dissolving those collaborations as you work with others on different projects. In some ways, this is the way Hollywood has been working for decades. And it’s also one that I increasingly see in Silicon Valley….”

 

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MIT President Profiled for Huffington Post Women In Power Series

by Amy Marcott on June 22, 2011

in Management

For the last few days, Huffington Post writer Matthew Dakotah has been profiling women in power, and today he wrote about MIT president and neuroscientist, Susan Hockfield. His piece begins with a quote by Hockfield:

“It is very clear to me–and I wish it were clear to everyone else–that the reason I am president of MIT right now is because of decades of very hard work by generations of women before me,” Susan Hockfield says. “The first woman graduated from MIT in 1873 and it officially became a coeducational institution in 1883, so there have been women on our campus for a very long time.” And that long progression is punctuated by Hockfield, who took the helm of the innovation powerhouse in 2004–the first woman to do so since MIT’s founding 143 years earlier.

Read the rest of the profile, titled, Women In Power: Susan Hockfield, MIT President, on Women in Science, Revolutionary Technologies, Why U.S. Policies Must Change.

Other pieces in Dakotah’s series:

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Running a Rescue: Thad Allen Interviewed for Sloan

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on May 16, 2011

in Learning, Management, Public Service

Thad Allen SM '89. Photo courtesy the George Washington University.

Thad Allen SM '89. Photo courtesy George Washington University.

Former Sloan Fellow Thad Allen SM ’89, the former National Incident Commander for the unified response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, spoke at the MIT Sloan Alumni Weekend, May 13-15, as part of Building the Future, a school-wide event that included the dedication of MIT Sloan’s new building.

Starting today, videos of the Building the Future sessions will be available online.

Catch his full interview on the Sloan Experts blog—meanwhile here a few excerpts:

Q: You’ve been involved in so many extraordinary events. Was there a class here that helped you in dealing with these challenges?

A: Absolutely. There was one course everyone remembers when they leave: Choice Points: Readings on the Exercise of Power and Responsibility. For several hours every Friday morning, we would read classical literature and derive ethical dilemmas from it. You can bring your spouse and friends. It’s an extraordinary course and directly transferable to leadership and managerial dilemmas you face on the outside.

Q: In many of the events you’ve been involved in, people experienced strong emotions. As a leader, how do you handle these situations?

A: One aspect to the emotional content of work like this is the natural reaction of communities that have been traumatized. Often, it’s anger and frustration. There is personal and societal grieving. You need to understand that, but you can’t let it hobble your response. You can’t become so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t focus on what you have to do.

People often are very angry, and they’re using a lot of energy being angry, when you could be using that energy to fix the problem. It’s often possible get emotional buy-in for a unified effort.

Read the full interview.

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Women and Leadership: Why the Pipeline Leaks

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on May 2, 2011

in Events, Management

Professor Nancy Hopkin’s keynote address at the MIT150 women’s symposia rocked the house. The molecular biologist, who is known for her research identifying genes required for zebrafish development and for her work promoting equality of opportunity for women scientists, traced the slow history of women’s advancement in academia and named the often invisible barriers to full equality.

Professor Nancy Hopkins

Professor Nancy Hopkins

Her 41-minute keynote at the Leaders in Science and Engineering: The Women of MIT Symposium, held March 28-29 on campus, identified sexual harassment and lack of mentoring as factors that cause leaks in the pipeline of women who are qualified to hold top academic posts.

Hopkins noted that until the 1960s there were virtually no women faculty because of a widespread cultural bias against hiring women. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock could not get a faculty job in the 1940s—except in home economics departments—even though she was the top scientist in her field.

“We think of science as a meritocracy and to a great degree it is, but Barbara McClintock’s story shows that society beliefs can overpower merit. You could be the best in the world and still not be hired.”

The passage of civil rights law, federal affirmative action guidelines, and the women’s movement in the 1960s finally spurred academic institutions to hire women. At MIT by 1970 there were two women faculty in science and engineering and that moved up to 10 women by 1973 and then pancaked for a decade. More work was needed, she noted:

“In retrospect, it’s very obvious that not being able to get a job is a serious barrier to women’s advancement. Equally clear is that the early ’70s was a turning point that threw open the doors of universities and other workplaces to women. But what… has taken us nearly 50 years to understand is that…there were a series of obstacles to women’s advancement that were unanticipated and largely invisible. Furthermore, some of these obstacles were almost as effective at excluding women as the fact that they couldn’t get a job at all. It turns out that identifying these invisible gender based obstacles and removing them takes about 30 years. When you realize it wasn’t just one of them but several, it’s easy to see why the pipeline leaked and why women’s progress to the top has been so slow.”

Watch videos of Hopkins’ keynote and the other sessions for more.

N.B. The Wikipedia entry on sexual harassment recounts MIT ombudsperson Mary Rowe’s role in defining and fighting it.

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