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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.