06 December 2007

Exponential Innovations

Howtoons had a very nice write-up by MIT Science Writer David Chandler in TechTalk today. We very much hope to reach millions of children worldwide with DIY play and experiential learning.

Met IDEO's Tim Brown today at Andrew Collins's MITX Fireside Chat. Asked him about products which empower exploratory users to be co-designers of their own experience. iRobot co-founder Rod Brooks was in attendance and his Roomba open-access interface is a live-case study of just such user-empowerment. Also in attendance were MIT Sloan's Jim Utterback, Dave Weber, and multiple Sloan Fellows. Google's Rich Miner was especially interested in the role of voice interfaces; Tim admitted that most designers were ignorant of that dimension (!) Uber-blogger Dan Bricklin was on-duty and captured the essence of things. Technology Review's Kathleen Kennedy was in the house, as was old compatriot Bruce Journey.

Earlier this evening, xconomy.com hosted a fascinating panel on building billion dollar ventures in New England. Chief Xconomizer Bob Buderi rallied Tim Greeley of IDG Ventures to moderate, Christophe Westphal of Sirtris (and Alynylam, Polaris, et al), Frank Moss of Media Lab (and Infinity, Tivoli, et al), and Helen Greiner of iRobot to hold forth on how-why-when we might giga-venture.

Lots afoot. I co-founded MIT's Developmental Entrepreneurship initiative so we could really dial things up, including granting travel moneys for students to field-test their venture plans over January. The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Judging is soon and will be announced next week December 13th, 2008.

More happening. New startups. Cluster crafting. Ecosystem engineering. All is going exponential.

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