MIT Student Entrepreneur Makes Climate Controlled Jacket

Cool article about an interesting innovation that an Indian student at MIT, Kranthi Vistakula dreamed up and executed on it. Love it. From the Economist Magazine:

His first approach was to build a jacket with built-in heating and cooling systems. Packed with motorised fans, heating pipes and electric wiring, the resulting apparel was bulky and weighed 7 kilograms. “When I wore it to college, my friends joked that I was going to blow up the place,” says Mr Vistakula. So he went back to the drawing board, and turned instead to a thermoelectric device called a Peltier plate, which operates like its better-known cousin, the thermocouple, but in reverse.

I shared that snippet because last year, a group of undergrad business students in my New Venture Creation class used a peltier system in their business plan for a efficient, constantly cooled & hygenic automatic salad dressing dispenser — no more crusty plastic bottles in melted ice at salad bars.

Vintakula of MIT has built a bunch of products and now has customers for his wares — both private and government. The company is Dhama Innovations — check out their stuff. Its pretty cool.

via Climate-controlled clothing: Don’t forget to recharge your jacket | The Economist.

New MIT Case Study Highlights Power of Campus Entrepreneurs

A case study of the entrepreneurial economy spawned by MIT was released last week. The report, Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT by Edward B. Roberts and Charles Eesley (both of MIT) looks pretty interesting and some of the numbers and statements in the press release are pretty amazing. Here is a snippet from the Kauffman Foundation’s website — you can download the report there. (I will post more on the report after I have read it)

According to the study Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT analyzes the economic effect of MIT alumni-founded companies and its entrepreneurial ecosystem, if the active companies founded by MIT graduates formed an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the seventeenth-largest economy in the world. Within the U.S., these companies currently generate hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs to regional economies, particularly those in Massachusetts and California. Globally, a less conservative estimate of their annual world sales would equal $2 trillion, producing the equivalent of the eleventh-largest economy in the world.

Yale Startups Leave for Better Pastures

According to Simona Covel at the WSJ’s Independent Street Blog, many Yale startups leave campus and head for Silicon Valley. In order to fight this high-tech flight, Yale created the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (which we featured here). From the post,

So far, says YEI director James Boyle, it’s working — at least a little bit. Two of last summer’s crop of six start-ups remain in New Haven. Just as important, Mr. Boyle says, is that the program leaves students and potential students with the impression that Yale is an incubator for student-run businesses, just like Stanford or MIT.

“It has been pivotal in demonstrating to the student body that you can start high-tech companies at Yale — a space where Yale usually isn’t known,” he says.

Does your campus put out the welcome mat for entrepreneurs? Is it true that tech startups need to be on the West Coast?

WSJ On Serial Academic Entrepreneurs

WSJ writer Rebecca Buckman has an interesting piece on the special relationship that exists between a leading MIT Scientist (Robert Langer) and a leading venture capitalist (Terry McGuire). The two have launched 13 firms together over the past 15 years.

In looking at the continuum of campus entrepreneurs, PhD’s like Robert Langer are at the extreme — high technical/academic knowledge. While few of us will ever achieve ‘superstar’ scientist status, their work offers great opportunities for those of us closer to the campus mean (MBAs, undergrads, social scientists, research assistants, etc.). As the article referenced notes, McGuire ‘cold called’ Langer one day after reading about his research.

From the WSJ article,

Together, Messrs. McGuire and Langer have launched 13 companies over the past 15 years and become a model for other venture capitalists scrambling to commercialize new drug and medical-device research. Dr. Langer, 59 years old, holds more than 600 patents and supplies the science; Mr. McGuire, 52, fine-tunes the business. Some of Mr. McGuire’s work with Mr. Langer was described in a 2005 Harvard Business School case study called, “The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science.”

Other serial “academic entrepreneurs” have teamed up with VCs to launch bioscience companies. They include Harvard professor George Whitesides, who helped start biotech giant Genzyme Corp. and drug company Theravance Inc., and Stanford ophthalmologist Mark Blumenkranz, whose research helped launch OptiMedica Corp., which is developing new technology to treat eye disease. Dr. Blumenkranz joined with venture capitalist Brook Byers on OptiMedica, and “we’re working on another project together,” says Mr. Byers, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But few venture capitalists have been as successful as Mr. McGuire in cultivating one scientist as a source of deals.