17 February 2009

Entrepreneurial Impact ~ MIT's Venture Ethos...

Interesting to see my MIT colleagues Ed Roberts and Chuck Eesley authoring a Kauffman Foundation Study [Which] Finds MIT Alumni Companies Generate Billions for Regional Economies. Here's the MIT News Office trumpeting the word. Some of the assertions are glorious...
"The 25,800 currently active companies founded by MIT alumni employ 3.3 million people and generate annual world sales of $2 trillion, equivalent to the 11th largest economy in the world."
One caveat, however -- since I ran the MIT Founders Project in the 1990s -- which was an actual direct count census -- and I have some sense of how many companies there really are co-founded by MIT-related people, I think the Roberts & Eesley so-called direct extrapolation technique substantially overestimates things (by maybe a factor of 3x or 5x). But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

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