I joined the NCET2 webinar of Edward Roberts’ presentation last week — “Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT” — to see what I could glean for Toronto’s benefit as we work toward creating a more entreprenuerial environment on University Ave.
The webinar homepage has the audio of the talk and a link to the slides.
Some of the most interesting bits to me were:
- Literal tech transfer is a very small part of the innovation ecosystem: although 30 startup firms got licenses from the MIT tech licensing office (TLO) in 2000, over 1,000 companies were started up by MIT alumni that year.
- The benefit of immigration: “~30% of foreign‐student alumni become entrepreneurs vs. ~20% of U.S.‐born alumni; half of the foreign‐student entrepreneurs remain in the U.S.” Roberts suggests a selection bias (the act of emigrating for school is itself entrepreneurial), but the take-away remains that these immigrants are good at creating jobs and we should encourage as many as possible to stay.
- Suggestions for other institutions:
- Institutional leadership and senior role models are required.
- Remove barriers to entrepreneurship in rules and regs.
- Consider supplemental incubator resources or even seed funding directly from universities.
- Engage alumni.
- Build internal entrepreneurship education programs, with integrated academic and practitioner faculty participants.
- Hold business plan competitions.
- Realign tech transfer offices: fewer lawyers, more project managers.*
- The value of VC alumni — although it’s not what you might expect — data from China suggest that connections will get a meeting with VCs but will not affect investment decisions.
*Note: A slip of the tongue, or an easy scapegoat: as Roberts no doubt knows, the best lawyers are excellent project managers.
