MIT Sloan Cross-Campus Links

DRAFT – Feedback, comments, criticism welcome

 

Joost Paul Bonsen

17 March 2001, updated 20 Feb 2002

jpbonsen@alum.mit.edu * 617.930.0415

 

0  Introduction

Why Connect Across Campus? -- Why is it so crucial to connect talent from all around MIT?  Far too many MIT students end up graduating from the Institute having met only a small fraction of their peers, the thousands of individuals on campus who are among the most highly selected and interesting people on earth.  And yet we know from personal experience and substantial anecdotal evidence how often MIT students, faculty, and alumni end up forming professional relationships with those they have worked with and trust – i.e. very often people they meet at school.  These folks are potential colleagues, collaborators on projects, co-founders of companies, and more.  But the pressures and culture of the Institute can discourage all but minimal interaction with only relatively few fellow students, never mind cutting across institutional boundaries.  There is thus a huge social opportunity cost to not meeting and interacting effectively with more peers while at MIT.  Since time and attention are our scarce resource, we need better means to connect student in focused, useful, and self-perpetuating ways.

 

MIT’s Potential Cross-Campus Combinations -- Furthermore, few institutions, if any, can match MIT’s powerful combination of top engineering, arts, and science programs with our top business program to create premier technology business educational offerings.  And yet all too rarely does MIT Sloan take full advantage of MIT and vice-versa.  It’s as if there are not only two cultures, but two campuses separated not merely by a few meters of road but by a chasm of cooperative disinclination. 

 

Sloan Possibilities -- And yet MIT Sloan was originally founded on the premise of approaching the problems of business and management from a new, practical perspective.  Born out of the engineering administration course 15, philanthropically financed by Alfred P. Sloan, MIT electrical engineering alumnus, class of 1895, and featuring analytically rigorous scholarship, MIT Sloan is – or ought to be – the premier “technologist’s business school.”  Rather than “dumbing down” to generalize and compete on terms set by classic peer business schools, MIT Sloan should “harden up”, emphasizing strategic savvy, a dynamic systems outlook, logical rigor, quantitative analysis, emerging technologies, high potential technology ventures, and effective links with inventors and innovators.

 

Better Sloan Integration -- Therefore, we aspire to better integrate Sloan with the rest of MIT to the substantial benefit of both business and technology students.  Toward this end, we are especially interested in what kind of infrastructure, institutions, and initiatives would best support and encourage rich cross-campus connections.  Such connections occur via vehicles ranging from:

(1)     formal Curricular offerings, such as elective courses and targeted seminars,

(2)     Quasicurricular special projects, research assistantships, special events, and so forth, through the less formal, but high leverage

(3)     Extracurriculars, such as events and activities run by student clubs.  Key additional infrastructure includes

(4)     savvy Promotion and positioning, getting students throughout MIT to know what’s already available and encouraging them to participate in focused ways.  Throughout MIT, we need considerably more

(5)     quality Social Spaces, well-designed physical plant that maximally supports formal and informal cross-campus connections.  Finally, we ought to seek

(6)     Bold Initiatives MIT Sloan can uniquely implement which attract and inspire talent from throughout the Institute and differentiate MIT from the rest.

 

 

1  Curricular Electives

What existing and new classes can we use to better connect technology and business students?  Electives have traditionally occurred when and if faculty are interested in offering them.  Such faculty motivation is crucial and certainly leads to a diverse set of offerings.  But such spontaneous or emergent elective creation can, alas, easily lead to strategic gaps in the MIT suite of offerings.  Specifically, we all too often lack electives which cater to non-traditional constituents, or straddle boundaries between disciplines, or survey wide fields instead of narrow domains of expertise.  And yet these types of electives tackle a crucial strategic goal, that of maximizing the odds of connection between disparate students throughout MIT.  We are especially interested in offerings whose creation, execution, or essential improvement is primarily a matter of administrative coordination and infrastructure.

 

1.1 Sloan Reaching Out to the Rest of MIT

Given capacity constraints, Sloan has lotteries, exclusive classes, and other barriers to cross-registration.  While necessary, such mechanisms nevertheless signal unwarranted aloofness and elitism on the part of business students towards the rest.  But technology student are key and substantive contributors to existing technology-intensive classes including, for example, Technology Strategy, New Enterprises, eBusiness, Information Technology, The Software Business, Product Design, Technology Marketing, and more.  And yet cross-registration in those classes is mostly by accident, largely ad hoc, or driven by the boom and bust of word of mouth.  What can we do to reach out to the rest of MIT in a high leverage fashion?

 

Technology Venture Strategy – We have learned from our Spring 2001 experience with Technology and Competitive Strategy, a “technology venture strategy” class with ~40% scientists and engineers, just how valuable this cross-disciplinary combination is.  The class is like a genetic recombination of a traditional New Enterprises course, teaching startup business planning, and a Technology Strategy course, teaching strategic frameworks using entrepreneurial cases, plus thematic surveys of nascent technologies emerging from the labs.  Cross-registrants from over a dozen different departments at MIT and Harvard are absolutely crucial to fostering high quality technology business projects and rich team experiences.  Can we scale up to recruit and embrace hundreds of qualified non-MBA students to courses like this?

 

Technology Business Essentials – A crucial piece missing from MIT’s suite of curricular elective course offerings is a survey overview of MIT Sloan faculty research interests and educational expertise, but at a high level of abstraction most suited to the intelligent student generalist.  There’s tremendous faculty disincentive to run something like this by themselves.  One way to address this deficit might be via a focused speaker series, perhaps called Technology Business Essentials, showcasing a dozen of the top Sloan faculty, a different one every week, each highlighting their own area of business expertise in a logical order and placing it in a larger context.  Both engineers and business school students would find this of value, the business students as a “Sloan sampler” of faculty they might meet in classes, and the technologists as an essential introductory overview of technology business.

 

1.2 MIT Content and Connections for Sloan

Most classes in the rest of MIT are necessarily concentrated on core technical fundamentals or drill down into a specific domain to considerable depth.  By contrast, most business students, and for that matter, many technology students, deeply desire a summary overview of emerging technologies, exposure to specific MIT technologies with new venture potential, and a core set of interdisciplinary courses.  Can we address this need with a new series of Institute-wide electives?

 

Emerging Technology Highlights – To provide an overview summary of technologies emerging from labs today, let’s showcase a dozen top technology faculty at MIT, one per week, each highlighting their own work and work of peers, all in line with the broad strategic thrusts of the Engineering School:  Information Technology, Biomedical Technology, and Materials Technology.  After each talk, we might ask the most relevantly related student clubs host a reception.  For example, after Biology Professor Eric Lander we ask the BMES, MicroArray Club, Hippocratic Society, and HealthTech Clubs to host the Cider and Cheese Social.  Or after Mechanical Engineering Professor Ian Hunter, we ask the Materials Society, Mech E’s Honor Society, etc. 

 

MIT Technologies with New Venture Potential – To provide focused interaction with specific researchers throughout MIT, we ought to offer a first-half fall semester class, featuring two to three dozen MIT faculty, post-docs, PhD candidates or research scientists talking about their inventions with new venture potential.  Technologist and business student teams would investigate market opportunities and craft a market opportunity assessment or business plan executive summary.  This deliverable is not only interesting in its own right, but could be directly applied to the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition’s Fall semester $1K Warm-Up round.  Students have the option to further their investigation in the second-half of the semester via themed Technology Venture Seminars looking at historical and live cases in their technology sector of interest.

 

Technology Venture Seminars – To provide more in depth analysis of the issues and challenges faced by the ventures considered in the first-half, we ought to offer a second-half fall semester discussion seminar consisting half of traditional HBS startup cases, and half of live cases featuring the MIT-related entrepreneurs via a live case-study.  To structure our live case-studies, we would distribute the key scientific journal articles and actual patents the company is formed around, plus a primer on the underlying technology, a sanitized executive summary, and the corporate webpages.  Rather than lumping all technology sectors together, we would run seminars themed around different technology sectors, one in each of Biotechnology, Information Technology, or Materials Technology Ventures, or even finer grain delineations depending on student demand.

 

1.3  Existing Interdisciplinary Courses

Various faculty and departments throughout MIT already offer a range of existing technology survey and technology business classes:  Emerging Medical Technologies, survey classes of one flavor or another, and multiple IAP offerings.  Rather than have these be fragmented, independent, isolated offerings, it makes sense to seek co-branding with MIT Sloan course numbers, co-listings, and the all-important co-promotion discussed further below.  Since there is overlap between the MIT Sloan agenda and these existing offerings, let’s seek several ways to better reflect our mutual interests.

 

1.4  An MIT Sloan Electives & Extracurriculars Strategy

Much effort has gone into “Core Redesign” and the introductory classes in the MIT Sloan programs.  While certainly necessary and worthy, many alumni list electives as their most valuable courses and the source of their most transformative experiences.  Such classes as Negotiation, Technology Strategy, System Dynamics, Planning and Managing Change, and others rank highly.  And yet such electives are largely an ad hoc consequence of individual faculty interest and inspiration.  Surely it makes sense to craft an MIT Sloan “Electives Strategy” and to actively recruit faculty and other capacity to create courses missing from the strategic mix.  Similarly, lets embrace the larger domain of extracurriculars as well.  This does not mean having the administration run clubs, but rather to provide infrastructure, continuity, perspective on what might be missing, and financial capital to incent new offerings.

 

 

2  Quasicurricular Projects

On the spectrum between Curricular and Extracurricular are a range of activities connecting students and faculty on a less formal basis than classes, but more formally than clubs.  These often are excellent all-purpose excuses for high quality interaction between the business and technology sides of campus.  Historically such connections have been ad hoc or even accidental.  With a bit of infrastructure and encouragement, we can get substantial return.  Example quasicurriculars include both Ongoing Projects and Special Programs and Events.

 

2.1  Ongoing Projects

Ongoing Projects play out over as little as a semester, but can stretch to the several year tenure of students at the Institute.  Examples include Technology Roadmaps, Market Opportunity Assessments, and classic Theses and other Special Projects.

 

Technology Roadmaps – Technology Roadmaps are focused forecasts and intelligent speculations about emerging technology trends.  Prototyped in 2000-01 as “Microphotonics Roadmaps” by MBA students Ryan Berryman and Craig Thomson with the guidance of Professors Charlie Fine and Leonel Kimmerling, Technology Roadmaps allow business students to investigate emerging trends in focused technology sectors.  Whether as quasicurricular efforts or through a specific curricular offering, the Roadmaps are a tangible means for business students to delve deeply into the technology side of campus.

 

Market Opportunity Assessment – Even if students do not take the MIT Technologies with New Venture Potential class, considering specific technologies and assessing the consequent business impacts is a generally worthwhile exercise.  By setting up the infrastructure to do such assessments more broadly, we educate our students about emerging possibilities and may even accelerate the rate at which MIT technologies are transferred.

 

Theses / Special Projects – Traditional theses and special projects are already existing general-purpose vehicles for high quality personal interaction and in-depth work cutting across traditional institutional boundaries.  And yet too few students realize this and far fewer know how to best take advantage of these mechanisms.  By both promoting these mechanisms and showcasing tangible best examples, we can best inspire an increasing percentage of students in each class to pursue ever more sophisticated projects.

 

2.2  Special Programs and Events

Special events are a rich source of connections, often at low to no marginal cost – since the events are already being run – but with substantial return.  Let’s systematically tap into and take advantage of events, including MIT technology and business conferences and special roles in the MIT Executive and Professional Education programs.

 

Technology / Business Conferences – MIT hosts a handful of major and dozens of minor conferences on a quarterly basis.  Let’s be sure to connect interested and appropriate students via these already available mechanisms.  Dave Weber of the MOT program, for example, has systematically encouraged MOT students to go to Technology Review Emerging Technology Conferences, MIT ILP/TLO Research Directors Conferences, and more.  Let’s generalize this proactive outlook school-wide.

 

MIT Sloan Ambassadors and Executive Ed Connections – MIT hosts dozens of 2-day through 2-week Executive and Professional Education sessions per year.  Let’s be more savvy about connecting our Masters and Doctoral students to this visiting population of key executives, perhaps via informal cocktail receptions or mini-Teaching Assistantships.  For example, by systematically having one or two dozen Technology Strategy graduate students act as “MIT Sloan Ambassadors” at receptions for visiting executives in the Tech Strategy Exec Ed course, we benefit both the students via great connections, and the executives with intellectually substantive conversationalists. 

 

 

3  Extracurricular Activities

Almost all organized student activities are either of a social or professional nature, sometimes combinations of the two.  Indeed, often the most productive professional relationships are built on a foundation set over time during repeated social interactions.  To foster such connections, we hope to orchestrate more serendipitous connections between disparate social and professional groups.  How can we focus moneys and people on the most worthy activities? 

 

3.1  Social

Most interaction at MIT occurs within groups, labs, centers, departments, or schools.  And yet many of the most interesting combinations and projects straddle disciplinary and institutional boundaries.  While substantial in volume, the vast majority of student social connections tend to be within narrowly ethnic or specialized social groupings.  We need to invest in mechanisms to cross-connect more broadly and on a pan-MIT basis.

 

TechLink – TechLink is an MIT student club which runs events and activities primarily to connect Graduate Students from all around MIT, bridging across internal Institutional boundaries to help build community.  TechLink started as a joint-venture by the MIT Sloan Senate and the MIT Graduate Student Council in 2000.  Most recently TechLink has run wine tastings, LabLinks combining students and faculty between paired labs or programs at MIT, campus-wide Wine & Cheese Jazz Socials, a graduate orientation BBQ, and the pan-MIT HackLink event welcoming newly admitted graduate students.

 

GSC / Sloan Senate – Both the Graduate Student Council and Sloan Senate uniquely span their entire respective student bodies and thus support a wide range of activities, including dozens of ethnic, social, and location specific events.  What can we do to enhance and deepen these efforts in the most savvy way possible?

 

3.2  Professional

Contrary to recruitment brochure propaganda, MIT Sloan MBA students remain largely disconnected from the professionally-oriented activities and events of the rest of MIT graduate students, with a few notable exceptions.  For example, participants in the campus-wide, student-run MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition do connect very nicely, as illustrated by alum company Akamai, the joint initiative of MBA student John Seelig, EECS PhD student Danny Lewin, and Professor Tom Leighton.  What else can we do to dramatically boost the quantity and quality of such campus-wide professional connections?  Can we better support E-MIT, SEBC, the MediaTech club, and others?

 

Stand-Alone Activities – The professional clubs play a strategically crucial role, not only as training ground for student leadership, but in crafting content and fostering connections most tangibly useful to students.  And yet with year-to-year turn-over in the student body, key operating practices and even the entire events and more are lost practices.  We need to inject some meta-infrastructure to both encourage key activities to form in the first place as well as ensure continuity over time.

 

Tie-In with Curriculars – With many of the themed curricular offerings, both existing and proposed, there are natural club connections.   For example, clubs could host receptions after appropriate lectures in Emerging Technology Highlights, or cooperate with the faculty on aspects of the Technology Venture Seminars. 

 

Cooperation on Quasicurriculars – Several quasicurriculars could be substantially helped with coordination and assistance of the professional clubs.  In many cases this could be as little as playing a promotional role through serving as MIT Sloan Ambassadors.

 

 

4  Promotion and Positioning

Given the firehose of information and alternatives students face, it’s little wonder that people simply don’t know of the most promising opportunities which await them.  We can tackle this with systematic improvements.  Let us emphasize what already exists and promote the key things we’re starting.

 

4.1  Ads Penetrating Rest of MIT

Promotion within the MIT Sloan community is relatively easy.  Email, flyers, and word of mouth convey essentials with dispatch.  By contrast, it’s much harder to promote openness and opportunities in the rest of MIT.  Especially among the engineering and science graduate student population there are few unified mechanisms for getting the word out.  By concentrating on this promotions problem and iterating what we do, especially given feedback, we can build up both email lists and a best-practices understanding of what works.

 

4.2  Actively Articulate the Already Available

All too rarely do students at MIT realize the full suite of curricular, quasicurricular, and extracurricular options already at their disposal.  Most certainly we should better promote what’s already going on, nevermind the new offerings we’re proposing.

 

4.3  Emphasize Key Options and Strategic Alternatives

Most students are unaware of the core worthy things they ought to do, classes to choose, accomplishments to aspire to, activities to consider, and faculty to collaborate with.  Rather than leaving this to cultural osmosis or word of mouth from class to class, MIT needs to clearly articulate and actively promote mechanisms for making the most of one’s time at the Institute, or, to put a brand on it, How to Savor Life @ MIT.

 

 

5  Quality Social Spaces

Compared to peer schools such as Stanford and HBS, MIT and Sloan singularly lack physical plant suitable for student social and professional activities.  The facilities are antiquated, basic infrastructure often broken, campus physical plant planning absent, and sociability spaces sub-standard and sickly.

 

5.1   MIT Sloan Campus

In general, the MIT Sloan campus is fragmented and under-capitalized.  Too small a percentage of our students live on campus, the physical plant is more densely used than anywhere else on campus, nevermind compared to peer business schools, and our building aesthetics are industrial age, at best.  Featuring a desolate windswept concrete plaza, stone cold seating, rusty art, and a highly trafficked automotive intersection, the center of the MIT Sloan campus is scandalously unsuitable as a social scene.  Such is the demand, however, that despite its qualities, even such a space, and buildings E51 and E52 on the periphery, serve as our social hub, as our quad for spontaneous gatherings.  Furthermore, it is shocking and unacceptable that the main Wong lecture hall is too small to hold the entire MBA class as a whole and that Tang is half the size needed for an MBA program the size MIT Sloan is running.  As part of the larger planning driven by the new MIT Sloan building, we really must consider how to build appropriate physical plant more conducive to formal and informal interaction between groups and individuals.

 

5.2 New MIT Sloan Building

Few other business schools in the world are as well situated as MIT Sloan overlooking beautiful Boston and the Charles River.  And yet this tremendous aesthetic asset is largely ignored by the current physical plant.  The new Porter Building ought to be perched right on Memorial Drive and architected to take maximum advantage of our bounty and undo many of the current campus deficits.  For example, the new building ought to have a football-field sized roofdeck featuring a 24x7 rooftop student bar and grill, a gymnasium with showers and personal lockers, a faculty club with deckspace and greater internal reconfigurability, a Kresge-sized lecture hall large enough to accommodate the school as a whole, with a commons-area breakout space useable as a venue for indoor C-Functions, and much, much more for faculty, staff, and students generally.

 

5.3  MIT Student Activities Infrastructure

Beyond MIT Sloan, most graduate student social activity is currently centered on dorms or either Walker Memorial or the Stratton Student Center.  Most of these elements of the Campus Activities Complex are space-constrained and in poor maintenance.  Walker is truly scandalous, worn down and neglected, an insult to the memory of Francis Amasa Walker, a visionary and entrepreneurial educator and arguably one of MIT’s greatest Presidents after our founder, William Barton Rogers.  Beyond these venues, the event space possibilities are severely limited.  Even the campus pubs, coffeehouses, and cafeterias are space-limited, minimally-maintained, and aesthetically barren.  We need performance venues, large-event space, informal student gathering rooms, multi-purpose study and activity centers, and substantially more.

 

5.4  MIT Campus Master Plan

In general, MIT’s campus suffers from organization by accident and accretion.  Rather than maintaining an enduring plan and elements of a common design, new buildings have been added in a nearly random fashion, both in geographic location and in aesthetic style.  Furthermore, what buildings do exist are not terribly conducive to either student or faculty community building.  In addition to tackling the more specific problems with student activities space and MIT Sloan social space, let’s think how to undo our planning errors and inject some rationality into the mix.

 

 

6  Bold Initiatives Differentiating MIT from Rest

Beyond building proper infrastructure and effective execution of the basics, let’s ask which activities and operations MIT and Sloan are uniquely able to do which would dramatically differentiate us from the rest and encourages substantive cross-campus connections.  Such initiatives ought to be bold moves, smashing through traditional budgetary strictures, lines of organizational authority, and institutional pre-conceptions.

 

6.1  Project Mercury

Let’s deploy tomorrow’s wireless Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and applications today at MIT Sloan, thus enabling advanced market research by creating a microcosm with accelerated IT diffusion, a zone for experimental anthropology where we track how our community of users adopt or reject the latest technologies, products, and services.  In addition to differentiating MIT Sloan from other business schools and exposing our students to literally the latest, greatest products, with “Project Mercury” we create the ultimate consumer testbed for as yet unrealized prototypes straight from various MIT labs.

 

6.2  Technology Entrepreneurship

By sharpening and clarifying the focus of the MIT entrepreneurship efforts to be principally about emerging high technology ventures, the implications of disruptive technologies, and technology venture capital, we can stake out entrepreneurial research and education terrain unmatchable by any peer schools.  Simultaneously, this “Technology Entrepreneurship” tact inspires deep connections with the science and engineering communities at MIT, since this too is their arena of aspiration.

 

6.3  Developmental Innovation

Given the poverty of five-sixths of humanity, MIT really ought to do a lot more towards systematically accelerating technological, cultural, and economic progress in developing nations.  Such a “Developmental Innovations” initiative would necessarily straddle multiple disciplines at the Institute.  The engineering program at MIT is increasingly embracing “developmental technologies” as a strategic thrust in addition to biomedical, materials, information, and complex systems engineering.  With practical developmental business efforts at MIT Sloan, including research into microfinance, microentrepreneurship, privatization, and more, we can make real Institutional strides towards a first world, distributed worldwide.