mit_impact_full_report

$20 million from Jaishree Deshpande and Desh
Deshpande, whose most recent entrepreneurial
achievement was as co-founder and chairman of
Sycamore Networks. Housed in the School of
Engineering, the Deshpande Center funds leadingedge
research on novel technologies in collaboration
with the New England high-technology
entrepreneurial and venture capital communities.
Via those linkages, the Center’s unique thrust is to
identify emerging MIT technologies that are especially
likely to be able to be commercialized, and to
accelerate and improve that process of movement to
market. It thus seeks to bridge the innovation gap
between idea and market.
Dr. Deshpande said: “MIT has always provided a
fertile ground where its students and faculty can
break through technology barriers, fuel new areas of
research and development, and fundamentally
transform whole industries…Our hope…is to give
creative new entrepreneurs…the ability to translate
their ideas into innovative companies and products.”
The Center supports a wide range of emerging fields,
including biotechnology, biomedical devices,
information technology, new materials, tiny tech, and
energy innovations. It provides Ignition Grants of up
to $50,000 each to enable exploratory experiments
and proof of concept, and then provides Innovation
Program Grants of up to $250,000 each to advance
ideas past the “invention stage.” Professor Charles
Cooney ’67 has served as the Center’s director since
its founding.
At the outset, the Deshpande Center was
announced as linked to the MIT E-Center, most
strongly evidenced by the establishment two years
later of the jointly taught “Innovation Teams” subject,
with mixed-student teams across MIT departments
focusing on developing commercialization plans for
Deshpande research projects.
The Deshpande Center engages in numerous
activities to seek out new faculty participants and to
aid those funded to gain visibility and networking
assistance from the relevant community outside of
MIT. The Center has recruited experienced
Recent MIT Institutional Broadening and Growth
entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to serve as
Catalysts who work closely with each research project
to provide guidance about market and
commercialization issues. Senior staff of the MIT TLO
work closely with the Catalysts to assist the project
principal investigators, as well as to help the I-Teams
that get formed around many of those projects. One
of the largest Deshpande activities with several
hundred in attendance is the annual, one-day
IdeaStream Symposium, featuring key MIT faculty
presenters, venture capital panelists discussing the
current “hot” fields, and display booths with chart
sessions for all of the currently funded Deshpande
grants.
From its founding in 2002 through the end of
2007, the Center had received about 400 research
proposals from several hundred MIT faculty. It had
provided $8 million in grant funding to eighty
projects. Follow-on research funding of the MIT
projects, from both government and corporations,
amounts to more than $3.5 million. Thus far, fifteen
companies have been formed, gaining more than
$100 million in outside capital investment and
employing more than 200 people.
Case Example: Myomo
A few of the significant spinouts of the
Deshpande Center are Brontes Technologies
(previously described in the section on the MIT
Enterprise Forum), Myomo, Pervasis Therapeutics,
Q-D Vision, and Vertica Systems. One example of
Deshpande Center commercialization is Myomo,
started with Deshpande funding in 2002 as the
“Active Joint Brace” research project of Professor
Woodie Flowers ’68. The case again reflects the
strong interrelationships among various parts of
the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem. The project’s
evolution from academic research toward
commercialization may be seen in the descriptions of
the work used at various times. The research group’s
initial self-description was: “Our research group aims
to create a wearable, affordable, unencumbering
exoskeleton that augments human physical capability
by working in parallel with existing musculature.”
ENTREPRENEURIAL IMPACT: THE ROLE OF MIT 63