Alex d'Arbeloff, chairman of the MIT Corporation, last week received the 1997 Entrepreneurial Leadership Award from the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Inc. for merging the practice and theory of entrepreneurship as the head of Teradyne and as a teacher, mentor, trustee and donor at MIT.
The citation, read at a November 1 luncheon in Walker Memorial Hall, placed Mr. d'Arbeloff "in the company of Ray Stata (last year's recipient), George Hatsopoulos of Thermo Electron, Edwin Land of Polaroid, Robert Noyce of Intel, Ralph Landau of Scientific Design, David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Amar Bose of Bose Corp. and George Kozmetsky of Teledyne, the first recipient of this distinguished award."
The award, established in 1993, recognizes corporate founders who have promulgated their entrepreneurial ideas through lengthy executive leadership and nurture of their own firms to major corporate size, and through their active participation in entrepreneurial education and research in the setting of a university.
"Both as the guiding force behind one of the state's leading high-tech companies and as a generous and dedicated public citizen, [Mr. d'Arbeloff] exemplifies these criteria," the citation said.
Mr. d'Arbeloff (SB '49) is co-founder and chairman of Teradyne, Inc. the world's largest manufacturer of automatic test equipment for the electronics and telecommunications industries.
He became president and chief executive officer in 1971, and under his leadership, Teradyne's annual sales increased from $13 million to well over $1 billion in 1996, when he completed the transfer of operating responsibility to his successor. He has been chairman since 1977.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 12, 1997.
