Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E)

Bloomberg reporter Kyle Stock spotlights the origin and future of Rivian, an MIT startup that has developed an electric pickup truck.

Fortune reporter Nicole Gull McElroy spotlights how the MIT Innovation Initiative and the Sloan School of Management are opening Innovation HQ, a 50,000 square foot space that will house a cross-disciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship lab. “Innovation HQ will offer students, alumni, faculty and staff a place to work, collaborate and create with six departments, lab space, an innovator’s lounge and a new space for music and arts innovation called Voxel Lab,” writes McElroy.

Orna Therapeutics, which was co-founded by MIT researchers, is working on “programming RNA with genetic code that instructs a line to split into several strands and then repair itself in the shape of a circle,” reports Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Angelica LaVito. “Delivering those messages via circles may produce a more stable, longer-lasting signal, potentially treating cancer, autoimmune disorders, and genetic diseases.”

TechCrunch reporter Kate Park spotlights Catalog, a startup founded by MIT graduates that is “developing an energy-efficient, cost-competitive and more secure data storage and computation platform by using synthetic DNA.”

Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma about the inspiration for her startup BloomerTech, which is focused on addressing heart disease in women, and the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials. As part of this effort, BloomerTech is developing a “sensor-enabled bra that feeds real-time heart data to doctors running clinical trials on women’s cardiovascular disease.”

Nature reporter Eric Bender spotlights MIT startup Kytopen, which has developed a microfluidic platform to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and other forms of cell therapy. We want to do minimally invasive surgery,” says Kytopen co-founder Prof. Cullen Buie.

President L. Rafael Reif and Linda Henry, CEO of Boston Globe Media Partners, took part in a wide-ranging fireside chat during the inaugural Globe Summit, touching upon everything from the urgent need to address the climate crisis to MIT’s response to Covid-19, the Institute’s approach to AI education and the greater Boston innovation ecosystem. “This is such an important global issue,” says Reif of climate change. “It’s the most serious challenge we have in our times.”
 

Forbes reporter Aayushi Pratap spotlights Vicarious Surgical, an MIT startup and surgical robot company aimed at making “abdominal surgery faster, easier and subject to fewer complications, starting with hernia repairs.”

Boston Globe reporter Janelle Nanos spotlights how MIT and the food incubator CommonWealth Kitchen will be hosting three new vendors in the Launchpad dining hall in the Stratton Student Center as part of MIT’s goal to support diverse, local start-up food businesses and help create a more just, equitable, and sustainable food economy. “The move stems from the July 2020 announcement by President Rafael Reif that MIT would work with more minority-owned businesses as part of its effort to fight systemic racism on campus,” writes Nanos.

Prof. Christopher Magee and his colleagues have developed a new method that could help provide insights into how quickly different innovations are improving, reports Christopher Mims for The Wall Street Journal.  Magee and former MIT fellow Anuraag Singh have developed a search engine that allows users to “answer in a fraction of a second the question of how quickly any given technology is advancing,” writes Mims.

Forbes contributor Greg Gardner highlights GPR, an MIT startup developing ground positioning radar for autonomous vehicles. “Ground-penetrating radar can map the road structure beneath a vehicle. That sub-structure is unique and stable, much like a fingerprint,” writes Gardner. “So it can enable vehicles to find their position, no matter how remote, reliably and accurately regardless of the road conditions or visibility of road markings above ground.”

TechCrunch reporter Christine Hall spotlights CodeSignal, a startup o-founded by alumnus Tigran Sloyan that is developing a skills-based assessment platform for hiring. Sloyan "got the idea for the company from an experience his co-founder and friend Aram Shatakhtsyan had while trying to find an engineering job,” writes Hall.

A new study co-authored by Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu finds that countries with older workforces are seeing a larger increase in the use of robots, reports Timothy Aeppel for Reuters. Acemoglu and his colleague Pascual Restrepo of Boston University found that “age alone accounted for 35% of the variation between countries in their adoption of robots, with those having older workers far more likely to adopt the machines.”

New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights the origin and history of MIT startup Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company founded with a “shared belief that biology could be made more like computing with reusable code and standard tools instead of the bespoke experiments of traditional biology." Jason Kelly ’03, PhD ’08, one of the founders of MIT startup Ginkgo Bioworks and the company’s chief executive, explains that “the ultimate goal for Ginkgo is to make it as easy to program a cell as it is to program a computer.”

Alumna Loewen Cavill speaks with Forbes contributor Mary Juetten about her startup AuraBlue, which is creating wearable technology aimed at improving sleep for menopausal women by automatically adjusting room and mattress temperatures. “After hearing again and again how sleep loss from nighttime hot flashes has completely flipped so many women's lives upside down, I had to do something,” says Cavill. “Enabling women to stay on their career path and perform their best at the final part of their career climb is the single most important thing I can do to promote women in leadership.”