Engineering Our WorldThe e-newsletter of the MIT School of Engineering

Our Initiatives

News Highlights

Bioengineering

Tiny Technologies

Information Engineering

Engineering Systems

Emerging Technologies

Diversity

Educational Innovation

MIT World™ Video

Emerging Technologies: Seeding Our Future

by Dean Thomas L. Magnanti, Vol. 1, No. 6, November 2004

We need to invest in new vectors of research – before the world agrees they're a good idea. By the time the money for a new realm of science and technology washes ashore, the most ambitious ships have already left the harbor.

From the airplane to the artificial blood vessel, from computers to nano-manufacturing, new technologies fuel the economy and improve the quality of our lives. Every new technology starts out as an emerging technology - one that made the challenging journey from promising idea to indispensable invention.

Emerging technologies are what make MIT's School of Engineering famous. The School has contributed to many of the major technological developments that transformed the last century: electricity, automobiles, spacecraft, radio and television, refrigeration, telephones, health technologies, and computers. Today, the Institute makes new invention disclosures at a rate of 1-2 per day; it leads the country's universities in patents obtained annually, with 150 new U.S. patents and 90 new license agreements for MIT in FY2003. MIT inventions add more than $20 billion and 150,000 jobs to the economy each year. In addition, MIT alumni have made an extraordinary impact on the economy by starting technology-based companies. In 1997, as cited in a well known Bank of Boston study, 4,000 MIT-founded companies employed over a million people and had annual world sales of $232 billion. If these companies had constituted a foreign country at that time, they would have ranked 24th-largest in the world – just behind South Africa and ahead of Thailand.

While we've been enormously successful in developing new technologies, remaining ahead of the curve is an ongoing challenge for a few reasons: the fast pace of technological change, competition from our sister institutions, and flat federal funding for basic research in engineering and the physical sciences. In addition, many companies that depend on the findings of basic science are no longer investing in long-term research. The consequence is a "funding gap" with an enormous amount of laboratory innovation that is underfunded or whose results are not harvested – in either case, failing to bear fruit as viable, commercial applications.

Through our Emerging Technologies initiative, we are addressing these challenges. Our efforts include a range of activities across the Institute, such as the School's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, a new course ("i-Teams") involving graduate students in the process of evaluating the commercial feasibility of innovations, and consortia and research in major projects that receive industrial and federal funding, such as the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN).

The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation

A principle vehicle for our Emerging Technologies initiative is the Deshpande Center. Launched in 2002 with a generous gift of $20 million from Jaishree and Guraraj "Desh" Deshpande, the Center is dedicated to bridging the innovation gap by reducing the technical and market risk around leading-edge technologies so others are willing to invest in and commercialize them. Its multi-pronged approach includes awarding grants twice per year to MIT faculty conducting promising research; hosting events such as the annual IdeaStream symposium, at which MIT researchers and members of the high-tech business community trade ideas; and recruiting "Catalysts" from the local business community who connect funded projects with local entrepreneurs, investors, customers, potential partners, and other key people who can improve the odds that projects become commercialized.

Since 2002, the Deshpande Center has funded 38 projects totaling $4.3 million. Its work has led to real successes, including:

  • the launch of two startup companies: Pervasis Therapeutics, a medical device technology company, and Brontes Technologies, a 3-D imaging company,
  • the licensing of a memory cell technology to a nanotechnology start-up,
  • numerous invention disclosures and patent filings,
  • a business plan that won the 2004 MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition and another that reached the competition's final round, and
  • the recognition of two Deshpande grant recipients, Professors Vladimir Bulovic and Martin Culpepper, in Technology Review's TR100 list of innovators for 2004.

The Deshpande Center welcomes the engagement and the support of the entrepreneurial and venture capital communities.

Education in Emerging Technologies

MIT teaches innovation in a variety of ways - through apprenticeship programs, laboratory research, the classroom, and student-based clubs. Among the latter is the Science and Engineering Business Club (SEBC), with over 1,000 members. The SEBC is an educational resource and network for MIT engineering and science students seeking careers in business.

An example of education in emerging technologies that links the classroom to the laboratory is "i-Teams" (short for Innovation Teams). Jointly taught by faculty in the School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management, this unique new course enables graduate students to engage in the process of bringing MIT innovations from the lab bench to the market. Each semester, students apply to join one of five teams based on technologies funded by the Deshpande Center. They then engage in a rigorous and selective process that introduces them to the dynamics of team formation. The resulting i-Teams develop go-to-market strategies for their research projects with the guidance of faculty and volunteers from the business community. Technologies for the fall 2004 semester include medical devices, microfluidics, fuel cells, colloidal crystals, and wireless communication.

The course has already proven successful: members of Active Joint Brace, the company that won last spring's $50K Entrepreneurship Competition, credited their accomplishment to their participation in i-Teams. Active Joint Brace is developing an electromechanical orthotic device that augments physical capability in people with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities. The team is currently engaged in patient trials. Another i-Team project, "the Nanogate," made it to the finals of the $50K and is launching a company called Active Spectrum. [See video. Scroll down to "Emerging Technologies."]

Laboratory and Center Research in Emerging Technologies

In FY2004, the faculty and staff of the School of Engineering supervised nearly $225 million in sponsored research throughout the Institute in a wide variety of technical arenas. The School also actively participates in major corporate alliances with DuPont, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, among others.

In 2002, MIT and an industry consortium partnered with the U.S. Army to form the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). Under that research umbrella, faculty from throughout the School of Engineering, in collaboration with those in the School of Science, are creating innovations that will likely have an impact well beyond the ISN's primary goal to create a 21st-century battlesuit for soldiers – a lightweight, bullet-proof jumpsuit that monitors health, eases injuries, communicates automatically, and possibly even lends superhuman abilities. Reducing the weight of the battlesuit will involve miniaturization on the nano-scale. ISN's research in the emerging area of nanotechnology provides the potential for creating unprecedented, new materials, properties, and devices that could solve problems with which scientists have struggled for decades. For examples of these possibilities, see the School of Engineering's video. (Scroll down to "Tiny Technologies.")

Strong, Interdisciplinary Base for Emerging Technologies

The Emerging Technologies initiative builds on a wide-ranging portfolio of existing activities and organizations at MIT related to innovation and entrepreneurship. These include the Technology Licensing Office, the Venture Mentoring Service, the Entrepreneurship Center, the Venture Capital and Private Equity Club, the Industrial Liaison Program, the Enterprise Forum, the School of Engineering's departments, laboratories and centers, and, of course, the Institute's Schools of Management and Science.

The MIT School of Engineering strives for "Leadership through technical excellence and innovation." We develop engineering leaders who both influence our world and create new technologies that change it. Imagine - if just a small percentage of the projects nurtured by the Emerging Technologies initiative changes our world, there's no doubt that the investments and risks will have been well worth taking.