Vacation

I'm off to Romania for a 3-week vacation. Amynescu's been busy with her film and she could really use my help. I helped her start it, and I should help help her finish it. I'm looking forward to doing something else other than writing papers, reading articles and figuring out how to do risk assessments.

Pieces of My Thesis

Tech Strategy was my favorite class in the second half. Partly because I liked Mary Tripsas' teaching style: lively, funny and insightful. So much so, I asked her to be my thesis advisor. But, wait! What's my topic? Most sane people figure out their thesis topic first and then look for an appropriate advisor. I did it completely backwards. After asking Mary to be my advisor I started thinking of possible topics. So I asked Mary to suggest some topics (isn't that what an advisor is for?). She seemed really excited about this solar power stuff that I've got myself into so she encouraged me to explore it. Hmmm! I do think energy (and especially clean energy) will be an important area of research and innovation in the coming years. So it may not be a bad idea to do a thesis on clean, renewable energies. Who knows? It may even lead to some entrepreneurial opportunities in the future.

A Lifetime of Knowledge

I really enjoyed the "Organizing for Innovative Product Development" class taught by Tom Allen. Tom is one of the foremost authorities in organizational structures and designs. His ground-breaking studies of communication patterns among engineers have produced often-quoted principles like the Allen Curve: the frequency of communication between engineers drops off exponentially as the distance between them increases. After about 50 m, there's very little communication between groups of engineers. His research studies have led to new organizational structures and building designs. The class was a bit slow; we could've probably finished it in 3 or 4 sessions. The advantage of having a professor like Allen is that he could give us a lifetime of learning in a nice, concise module. Not many professors can summarize their teachings so well. Tom did. And I feel fortunate to have had him as a professor (not least because this may be the last class he'll teach before retiring - which made me think of this picture I took in the spring: the young blossoming tree next to the old perennial).

Oh, and yes, he did answer my question regarding the concentration of biotech firms near MIT. Biotech is one of the industries that feeds directly on science and converts it to marketable products (unlike other industries where science needs to be converted to technology/engineering and then to a product). And were would you find the best scientists? At MIT of course.

And the Winners Are...

... third place: Synergetic Power Systems!

Not bad considering we put all this together in just 3 months. I'm psyched! The grand prize winner was a company called Stellaris that has patents, customers and is well on its way to being a real start-up (we're not even incorporated, but that may change now). Winning a prize in this competition is a great validation for us: we have something here and we should continue to develop our technology.

However, this was not the biggest news that we received last night. We now have a customer for our product. A customer that has big, deep pockets and offices in every country of the world: it's called the World Bank. Yup, we received a $130K grant from the World Bank to develop this technology and make it available to emerging marktes around the world, starting in South Africa. The World Bank grant was not connected at all with the Ignite Clean Energy competition (in fact, the application for this grant was done before I even joined the team), but it should help us tremendously with our US-based business plan. Here's a huge pot of money (with some strings attached) which will help us develop prototypes and validate the concept. And better yet, we don't have to sell our souls to the (VC) devil...

Ignite Clean Energy

I've spent most of the weekend working on our presentation for Ignite Clean Energy business plan competition. The final competition is on Tuesday night. We're competing with nine other teams for a grand prize of... who knows how much. It doesn't really matter. I've already learned so much through this process that even if we don't win anything on Tuesday, we'll all be better off after going through this entire process. I have to say, we've developed a nice little business plan (considering that it all started with a few half-baked ideas just 3 months ago). Our team has put on a tremendous effort including in-depth market research, meetings with potential business partners, marathon brainstorming sessions, financial analysis, practice pitches, etc. Along the way we've done a lot of organizational soul searching and got to know each other pretty well. If we win anything, we may even incorporate and attempt to start a new business. If we don't win anything, well..., the fond memories will remain. I found this picture of our team on the Ignite web site.

Entrepreneurship, Finance and Law

While looking through the catalog of Sloan classes that I should take this fall, I found an interesting one called "Basic Business Law Tilted Towards Innovation and Strategy". Now, business law can put me to sleep sometimes, but, as an aspiring entrepreneur, it can also put me out of business if I don't pay attention to issues like contracts, patents and employment law. The course promises to: teach "legal issues that arise in the context of innovation and development of busines strategy including the legal framework of transnational business, developing cutting-edge technologies and products, and restructuring and repositioning major corporations." Sounds very interesting! So I plunked down all my 1000 Sloan bid points hoping to get into this class which is only taught in the fall and has a limited enrollment of 55.

My reasoning is that in the spring I focused mainly on entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship Sloan class, business plan competitions, etc.). In the summer I'll be focusing more on finance (we're taking the Accounting and Managerial Finance class which is required for SDM). That leaves the fall semester to focus on business law so I can round up my knowledge for a career in small business or entrepreneurship. I'm psyched!