15.TVS – Technology Venture Seminars

DRAFT – Comments and Criticism Welcome * Joost Paul Bonsen * 29 January 2002 * jpbonsen@alum.mit.edu * 617.930.0415

Summary Proposal – Technology Ventures Seminars (TVS) are a series of fall semester seminars run around emerging technology themes at MIT. This is a mechanism for MIT Sloan to reach out to students in different Schools, Departments, and Labs in a tangible and focused fashion. By asking student teams to prepare an executive summary as their class deliverable, we encourage them to do something practical, both as a learning experience and to craft a plan which they may choose to enter in the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Prototypes – Several courses have served to prototype these Tech Venture Seminars. In Fall 2001, 15.971 / MAS.967 Developmental Entrepreneurship with Professor Sandy Pentland surveyed developmental technologies, microfinance, microentrepreneurship, and other business approaches to accelerating progress in developing countries. The Spring 2002 15.968 Building a Biomedical Enterprise with Professor Fiona Murray surveys strategic & organizational challenges in building biomedical and life science ventures.

Potential Themes – With such mini-courses, we can concentrate on more focused and deeper technology & business interests. These would be smaller, on the order of two or three dozen students, in more of a case or small-group style classroom. Potential Themes could be broad & general or specific & focused, depending on the interests and ambitions of faculty:

· General

o Biotech

o Infotech

o Tinytech

o Developmental Entrepreneurship

· Focused

o eBusiness, Web, Security…

o BioInformatics, Pharmatech, Medical Devices…

o Wearables, PDAs, Wireless…

o MEMS, Photonics, Spintronics, NEMS…

Integrating Student Extracurricular Activities – Each theme is aligned with the interests of one or several extracurricular student activities. For example, with the Biotech seminar, the BioStrategy Club, HealthTech Club, or BioMedical Engineering Society are relevant. At least once or twice during the semester we might have a class-related social gathering co-organized by these extracurricular clubs. This allows both reinforcement beyond class boundaries but serves as active recruitment. Finally, the TVS deliverable – a business plan executive summary – is exactly aligned with the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition $1K Warm-up assignment in the Fall Semester. By encouraging people to combine class & extracurriculars, we have tremendous leverage and influence at relatively little cost.

Example General TVS Possibilities:

· MIT Tinytech Ventures Seminar – fall-semester Institute-wide elective – A seminar surveying micro-thru-nano, chips & hardware -specific technology strategy cases in a discussion format. Cases include industry classics and live cases featuring MIT alumni and local entrepreneurs at various stages of building their businesses. Possibly limit total class size by requesting one paragraph applications or more. Actively recruit best students as participants drawn from all around MIT. Possibly include a few MIT entrepreneur alums to spice things up, perhaps even lead the discussion. Possible Cases include: Iridigm Display, MicroChips, SurfaceLogix, EINK, Analog Devices, Nanovation, Sycamore, and others…

· MIT Infotech Ventures Seminar – fall-semester Institute-wide elective – A seminar surveying information, computation, communication, and media-specific technology strategy cases in a discussion format. Cases include industry classics and live cases featuring MIT alumni and local entrepreneurs at various stages of building their businesses. Possibly limit total class size by requesting one paragraph applications or more. Actively recruit best students as participants drawn from all around MIT. Possibly include a few MIT entrepreneur alums to spice things up, perhaps even lead the discussion. Possible Cases include: Akamai, DataSage, Virtual Machine Works, Curl, Frictionless Commerce, Firefly, Wildfire, Charmed, and others…