Cultivating a University’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: A Master Class with Ed Roberts

This is part of my Series on University Entrepreneurship.

 Last week the National Council for Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer hosted a fantastic webinar in which MIT Professor Ed Roberts held forth and responded to questions with contagious enthusiasm for over ninety minutes addressing the origins and evolution of the formidable entrepreneurial ecosystem at MIT. He is certainly uniquely qualified to do so having been a student who earned four degrees from MIT including a PhD in Economics, a business school professor, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist, CEO, Chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and Chair for 30 years of the MIT Sloan’s Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group. He is also the co-founder of the MIT Management of Technology Program and is the author of eleven books and 170 articles on the subject of entrepreneurship and technology.

He has also recently conducted a landmark study entitled, "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT" which demonstrates that “if the active companies founded by MIT graduates formed an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the 17^th largest economy in the world.” From this study we learn that MIT alums have founded in excess of 25,000 active companies that have generated sales of $2 trillion worldwide and employed 3.3 million people. As I have stated in previous posts, American universities are an absolutely profound engine of transformative innovation for the US and world economies. Studies and statistics like those put forth by Dr. Roberts make an emphatic case for the immensely positive economic impact of university entrepreneurship.

In the webinar Professor Roberts shares his experience and insights into the importance of understanding a university’s underlying culture and the need for institutional leadership on the issue of advancing entrepreneurship. He shares his experiences with various types of alumni initiatives, with the establishment of a comprehensive entrepreneurship curriculum, his opinions on the proper approach of the university’s tech transfer office, and the role that student groups as well as university institutions play in the process. He also stresses that there is no single formula- one must always adapt to the particular environment and setting of one's own university.

As someone who operates the university venture lab at Columbia University it was terrific for me to compare notes and get a sense of the big picture from someone who has been engaged in cultivating university entrepreneurship for nearly a half century. As always I welcome your thoughts and comments.

 

For Part Eleven in this Series, click here

Comments

[Daniel Behr]

We're still missing a big point when it comes to the path to new opportunity creation.

Ed's talk was terrific. Nobody can argue that fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem is fundamentally important.

However, there's a big hole when the topic of the "ecosystem" comes up. Everyone speaks of incubators, seed funds, mentoring, entrepreneurial education, etc. - all geared at creating teams to start companies and raise venture funding. This is all well and good, but the big problem (at least at the university / research institute level) is that somebody has to FIRST CONVERT SCIENCE INTO PRODUCT (i.e. someone has to bridge the commercialization gap). For this you don't want the capital IN-efficient infrastructure of a whole new start-up for every commercially interesting technology. Rather, you need a new business model designed to first convert science into product cost-effectively (and profitably) and to kill things early and dispassionately when they don't work. Those that are successfully translated will also be substantially de-risked - and the appropriate commercial path (out-license, spin-out) will then become much clearer. Maybe a start-up is justified at that point and then the kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem Ed spoke about is certainly important.