mit_impact_full_report

MIT—Its Unique History, Culture, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
companies had been documented by early 2008 as
located within this complex, compared with fifty-five
just three years prior. Thirteen of the Kendall Square
life sciences companies accounted for two-thirds of
the $1.8 billion Massachusetts companies spent on
R&D in 2000. By the year 2001, twenty-one of the
Kendall Square companies either were founded by
MIT alumni or faculty, or had MIT-licensed
technology; their revenues were $2.5 billion.
Since 2001, the biotech numbers have continued
to grow substantially. In ongoing research on the MITrelated
life sciences complex in Cambridge, Professor
Fiona Murray of MIT Sloan now finds that sixty-six of
the 493 MIT “life scientists” (including those at the
affiliated Broad and Whitehead Institutes) have
founded or served on the boards of directors of at
least one venture-funded company, totaling 134
companies in all. Eighteen of these faculty or staff
have founded or been board members of at least
three companies each, with one MIT faculty member
having twenty such relationships. Fifty additional MIT
“life science” people serve as science advisory board
members of an additional 108 companies, bringing a
total of at least 242 life-science companies into strong
ties with the MIT community. These ties are both
cause and result of the interconnections between MIT
and the entrepreneurial and industrial community. A
large fraction of these life sciences faculty, post-docs,
and staff do not have MIT degrees, and therefore are
not counted among the MIT alumni entrepreneurship
firms discussed in the earlier part of this report.
Therefore, the economic and technological impact of
these companies, by and large, supplement the data
presented in the beginning of this report.
Another sign of linkage of this cluster to MIT is
the record of biotech/biomedical winners and runnersup
in the MIT $50K Competition, the student-run
business plan competition that will be discussed in
greater depth later in this report. Data compiled by
the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, listed in Table 9,
shows fourteen bio-related companies in the last
decade, several of which became real companies
following their MIT $50K successes.
Table 9
Recent Biotech/Biomed MIT $50K Leaders
Company Year Outcome
SteriCoat 2006 Winner
Balico 2005 Winner
Active Joint Brace 2004 Winner
SmartCells 2003 Winner
Ancora Pharmaceuticals 2002 Finalist
Crosslink Medical 2002 Finalist
Angstrom Medical 2001 Winner
Iptyx 2001 Finalist
SiteSpecific Pharma 2001 Finalist
SmartCure 2001 Finalist
EyeGen 2000 Winner
MolecularWare 1999 Winner
Virtmed 1998 Finalist
Actuality Systems 1997 Winner
A second cluster has formed rapidly in the
energy field. Over the past five decades, 3 percent
of MIT entrepreneurs classified their firms as being in
the energy sector. We now estimate that MIT alumni
are creating thirty to thirty-five new energy-focused
firms every year. Several hundred companies are in
the New England energy cluster, with 263 in
Massachusetts alone by early 2008. In Figure 16,
we show the Boston metropolitan portion, containing
twenty-two energy companies in Cambridge and
twenty-five more in Boston. The broad geographic
distribution of the energy firms, relative to the
biotech companies shown in Figure 15, reflect the
large number of source organizations of the energy
companies, their wide diversity of technological
bases, and their need for somewhat greater physical
space than is readily available in central Cambridge.
A high percentage of the new energy firms are
MIT-related in terms of their founders and/or
technology sources.
ENTREPRENEURIAL IMPACT: THE ROLE OF MIT 37