Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E)

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.”

Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma spotlights BitSight, a cybersecurity ratings company founded by MIT graduates. “The company’s platform uses algorithms to assess a company’s chances of being breached,” writes Verma. “It also provides customers with cybersecurity ratings, risk metrics, and security benchmarks to better assess and combat cyber threats.”

Bloomberg’s Janet Wu speaks with alumna Nan-Wei Gong PhD '13, co-founder of Figur8, an MIT startup applying AI to help diagnose musculoskeletal problems. “Figur8 is a tool that really brings lab experience into the field so everyone can quantify their musculoskeletal injuries,” says Gong. “We invented a wearable system that allows you to capture biomarkers of your musculoskeletal health and pinpoint injury through our AI algorithm.”

Forbes contributor David Blackmon spotlights Ambri, an MIT startup that is developing liquid-metal batteries. Blackmon writes that Ambri has developing a new battery technology that could “help renewables like wind and solar scale up more rapidly in the coming years and help them occupy a larger share of electricity generation around the world.”

TechCrunch reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spotlights Insurify, a startup founded by alumna Snejina Zacharia. “Insurify has built a machine learning-based virtual insurance agent that integrates with more than 100 carriers to digitize — and personalize — the insurance shopping experience,” Azevedo explains.

Reporting for the PBS NewsHour, Miles O’Brien visits alumnus Dexter Ang ‘05 to learn more about how his startup, Pison, is developing a wrist-worn sensor that detects the faint electrical signals controlling simple hand gestures, allowing users to control digital interfaces using brain signals. “The device is connected to a smartphone, allowing control of it or other devices, conveyor belts in factories, drones, even pinball machines, to name a few,” notes O’Brien. He adds that Ang was inspired by his late mother, who contracted ALS, as “he wanted to make her life easier.”

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters spotlights LiquiGlide, an MIT startup that has developed a non-toxic lubricant that can be used to ensure each drop of a product slides out of the bottle, lessening waste and making recycling easier. “We all think when we throw a bottle into a recycling bin it will get recycled, but recycling is almost impossible when product is left behind and you need a significant amount of water to clean it,” says Prof. Kripa Varanasi. “So the reality is that some of this packaging actually ends up in a landfill.”

Motherboard reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley spotlights Unit, a new digital platform developed by MIT graduate James Earl White that is aimed at easing the unionization process. Gurley writes that White “founded Unit after volunteering with several labor organizing campaigns in college, and studying how unions can reduce income inequality.”