01 April 2008

Entrepreneurship @ Harvard...

MIT undergrad Albert Park just wrote a piece on Xconomy.com entitled Harvard Entrepreneurship Lives! (A Report from an MIT Student)

In my reply comment to Albert, I pointed out that...
there have been several waves of activity at Harvard, including a club co-founded by Bill Haney who started FuelTech in his dorm on the Yard and later Molten Metal Technologies, and also a later business club effort by Dan Hart who was early at Silicon Spice, Deploy Solutions and Echo music. And that’s just Harvard College efforts.

Curiously enough, it’s been easier for Harvard grad school folks to enter — and become finalists and even win — in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition than to participate in things in other schools at Harvard. HBS is notoriously isolationist in this respect (despite the fact the MIT technologists have been the core of multiple winning teams in the HBS competition, including LowCostEyeglasses and Bang Networks).

We have several examples of Harvard people doing well in the MIT competition, for instance, Harvard Law’s Gary Culliss of DirectHit and Belinda Juran of Actuality come to mind, Grand Prize winner and Runner-up winner in the $100K (back in its $50K days). And Harvard Medical’s Shai Gozani of Neurometrix and Nina Dudnik of SeedingLabs. And in the Developmental Entrepreneurship class I teach at MIT, we’ve had dozens of very entrepreneurial cross-registrant students from both the Harvard Kennedy School and Education School, including key leaders of three out of the five semi-finalists in the Development Track in this year’s MIT $100K.
But I ran into HBS Professor Karim Lakhani this afternoon and he tells me interesting plans are afoot. When Harvard University moves Science and Engineering activities to the Allston side of the Charles -- co-located with HBS -- it opens up tremendous opportunities for better technology-business connections at Harvard. (This, btw, is something I've been personally championed and been involved in since 200o-2001 as the founding TA for the first-ever joint MIT Media Lab-HBS class on Technology & Competitive Strategy with Professors Joe Jacobson and Brian Silverman.) Stay tuned for updates...

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