September 2005

The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

Continued from page 1

By Katharine Dunn

It's in the Genes
MIT has always encouraged both invention and entrepreneurship. Since the Institute's inception in 1861, students, faculty, and alumni have faithfully followed its motto, mens et manus, or mind and hand--taking what they've learned at MIT and applying it to the real world. "It's in our genes," Tom Magnanti, School of Engineering dean, told those gathered at a National Association for Engineers regional meeting last May. The Institute has spun off companies for more than a century, starting with Arthur D. Little in 1886 and progressing through Raytheon to the more than a thousand companies created in the last decade alone.

A 1997 study conducted by BankBoston found that there were 4,000 MIT-related companies employing more than a million people around the world with annual sales of about $232 billion--a figure comparable to the gross domestic product of South Africa or Thailand. Between 1996 and 2004, an average of 20 startups formed each year to commercialize MIT-owned technology, according to the Technology Licensing Office. (The peak number was 30 in 2000, during the dot-com boom.)

"Fifty years ago, there were no formal [entrepreneurial] organizations such as we have today. But there still was the culture," says Merton Flemings '51, SM '52, ScD '54, director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, which supports invention. "Faculty were encouraged to do something with their ideas. It's in the charter that we're not only here to educate and do research but also to serve. Part of serving is interacting with industry."

There have been isolated entrepreneurial pursuits on campus for decades: Sloan ran an entrepreneurship course in the early 1960s; the Alumni Association launched the Enterprise Forum as a networking group for businesspeople in 1978; and E-Club started in 1988. But today there are many more, and they often collaborate. During the May meeting, Magnanti showed the audience a chart illustrating entrepreneurial programs at MIT. "I doubt there are more than a couple of universities in the country that could put up a slide like this," he said.