Dear Friend of the Deshpande Center,

In case you thought there'd be a lull in activity at the Deshpande Center after our annual IdeaStream symposium in April, nothing could be further from the truth! On top of celebrating the Center's first funding and licensing deals, we received our first patent, launched a new course for graduate students called i-Teams, held a Faculty Entrepreneurship Workshop on splitting founders' equity, and saw the Active Joint Brace project win the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. As we send this, we are reviewing pre-proposals for the Fall 2004 grant round.

Krisztina Holly
Executive Director

Contents

• A Deshpande Center first - Chen receives patent
• i-Teams completes successful pilot, launches in fall
• Active Joint Brace wins $50K Entrepreneurship competition
• "How to Split Equity" - Faculty Entrepreneurship Workshop
• i-Teams organizers win prestigious entrepreneurship prize
• Fall 2004 Grant Program status
• IdeaStream presentations available on-line
• Langer wins Kettering Prize

A Deshpande Center first - Chen receives patent

This just in - Chiping Chen, principal research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and co-PI Richard Temkin of the Department of Physics, were recently awarded a patent for work related to a Deshpande Center-funded project on a novel, low-cost power amplifier for wireless base stations. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting development!

i-Teams completes successful pilot, launches in fall

The i-Teams (Innovation Teams) program successfully piloted this spring and will officially launch as a course during the Fall 2004 semester. I-Teams brings together ambitious and highly qualified graduate students from across campus to assess the commercial feasibility of innovations supported by the Deshpande Center and build go-to-market strategies for the technologies.

"For an entrepreneurial student, this is a unique opportunity to work with some of the most cutting-edge technologies and collaborate with the leading thinkers at MIT," said Sloan School graduate student and i-Teams organizer Omer Cedar.
"We are going to select the projects and start teambuilding in midsummer," said Ken Zolot, the i-Teams instructor. The course (2.937, 10.807, 15.397) will be taught jointly between the Sloan School and the School of Engineering. Graduate students are encouraged to apply to the rigorous and selective process.

To keep up to date on the process, join the i-Teams mailing list: i-teams-info@mit.edu. For more information on i-Teams, go to the i-Teams web page.

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Active Joint Brace wins $50K Entrepreneurship Competition

The Active Joint Brace team shows off its prize. Kailas Narendran (far left) and John McBean (far right) co-founded the project, whose PI is Prof. Woodie Flowers.

Congratulations to the Active Joint Brace team for winning the 2004 MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition! We also congratulate Active Spectrum, which made it to the final round of the competition.

"The teams made tremendous progress this semester in establishing commercial feasibility, understanding the marketplace, and defining go-to-market strategies," remarked Krisztina Holly, Deshpande Center Executive Director. "I was not entirely surprised that the teams did well, but the competition was fierce, and the evening was a real nail biter. I couldn't help but jump for joy when they announced the winner!"

Both teams credited Deshpande Center support, particularly the new i-Teams program, for their achievement.

"Support from the Deshpande Center and the i-Teams class helped us create a focused team to build a business plan that encapsulates the enormous amount of data we've gathered and progress we have made," said Kailas Narendran, co-investigator from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and one of the founders of Active Joint Brace. "The fact that for the last two years we haven't even made the $50K semi-finals, and are a winner this year, speaks volumes about what the Deshpande Center and i-Teams have done for us."

Active Joint Brace's business plan, based on technology supported by the Deshpande Center, received the contest's top prize of $30,000. The company is developing an affordable, wearable, non-invasive brace that augments physical capability in people with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities. Active Spectrum's business plan is based on the project titled The Nanogate: A Tunable MEMS LC Filter, which is based in the research laboratory of Prof. Alex Slocum.

A big thanks to entrepreneur Steve Kelly, Prof. Woodie Flowers (Active Joint Brace PI), and all of the Catalysts and advisors who contributed to the project and the business plan; to Omer Cedar, Ken Zolot, and the rest of the folks who helped create and support the launch of i-Teams last spring; and to the MIT $50K for the great opportunity.

"The team has been fantastic, and with the help of all our supporters, this remarkable technology will have an even greater chance of making a difference in the lives of people with disabilities," said Holly.

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"How to Split Equity" - Faculty Entrepreneurship Workshop

Our April 27 Faculty Entrepreneurship Workshop, "How to Split Equity," focused on the crucial and potentially awkward process of determining founders' equity in a startup, as well as how investment impacts that ownership.

Three panelists walked the workshop attendees through these processes:

• Eric Silverman, Principal and founder of St. James Capital, LLC; founder and partner of Transitions Capital; and serial entrepreneur
• Alex Laats, Deshpande Center Catalyst and venture partner at Commonwealth Capital; serial entrepreneur; and a former officer at the MIT Technology Licensing Office
• Barbara Johnson, Partner of Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault, LLC's Business Practice Group

The panelists unanimously advised faculty entrepreneurs to make decisions about founder's equity – preferably with a lawyer present – as early as possible in the process of founding a company. See a complete write-up of this event.

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i-Teams organizers win prestigious entrepreneurship prize

Congratulations to this year's Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. '59 Award winners: Omer Cedar, Othman Laraki, and Hans Tung, all graduate students in the Sloan School of Management.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center's Managing Director, Ken Morse, presented this prestigious prize at the MIT Awards Convocation in May. The award recognizes the three winners' cultivation of cross-campus collaborations, particularly their significant role in helping the Deshpande Center and the Entrepreneurship Center develop and implement the i-Teams (Innovation Teams) Program.

"I am deeply honored to receive this award as a first-year graduate student, and I am grateful for the leadership and support provided by Krisztina Holly and Ken Zolot in launching the i-Teams Program. I consider this award a vote of confidence to continue our efforts to add value to the entrepreneurship engine at MIT," said Cedar.

We not only congratulate the McGovern Award winners, we also give thanks to the entire MIT VCPE (Venture Capital and Private Equity) Club for their significant contributions to MIT and the Deshpande Center this past year.

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Fall 2004 Grant Program status

Thanks to all who submitted pre-proposals for the Fall 2004 round of grants. "The continued submission of high numbers of pre-proposals speaks well to the state of innovation amongst our faculty," noted Prof. Charles Cooney, Faculty Director for the Deshpande Center. We're reviewing the proposals and will call for full proposals on June 28; full proposals will be due July 18. If you missed the deadline for this round, stay tuned for announcements this fall about the Spring 2005 grant round. For proposal criteria and additional information about the Deshpande Center Grant Program, go to the grant section of our website.

IdeaStream presentations available online

Most of the presentations from the April 2004 IdeaStream symposium are now on-line. You can find links to the presentations by going to this year's IdeaStream agenda web page.

Langer wins Kettering Prize

Robert Langer, the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and a Deshpande Center grant recipient, was recently awarded the Charles F. Kettering Prize, Tech Talk reported in early June. One of three awards given each year by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, the $250,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding recent contribution to cancer diagnosis or treatment.

A novel tissue engineering technology, for which Langer received funding from the Deshpande Center in the fall of 2002, was spun off into a biotechnology company, Pervasis Therapeutics, this spring.

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