Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E)

MIT startup Fourth Power, founded by Prof. Asegun Henry, has developed a solar cell that generates its energy through built-in solar panels powered by hot graphite, writes Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “The Fourth Power system can be heated up using renewable energy, like wind or solar power, at times when these resources are cranking out surplus power,” writes Bray. “[T]he Fourth Power technology could become a preferred method of providing extra power to electrical grids during periods of peak demand.” 

Emily Knight, President and CEO of The Engine  will serve as Boston’s next economic development chief, “bringing life back to empty downtown office spaces, supporting neighborhood business districts and keeping young workers in Boston as the cost-of-living soars,” writes WBUR’s Eve Zuckoff. “I want to help companies start here and grow here while making sure the jobs and industries they create are felt in every neighborhood across the City,” says Knight.  

Mayor Michelle Wu has appointed Emily Knight, president and CEO of The Engine as Boston’s next economic development chief, writes Shirley Leung for The Boston Globe. “Real estate and economic development are so deeply connected that building those relationships is absolutely a priority for me,” says Knight.  

New York Times reporter Quinn Glabicki highlights Coastal Assembly, an MIT spinout that uses AI, satellite and ocean current data to monitor communities threatened by coastal erosion and create underwater structures to regrow beaches at nearly 900 coastal sites. “We can go to any community around the world and understand what has happened and then propose a solution that is very precisely tailored to them,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, one of Coastal Assembly’s founders.  

President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif joins Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman to discuss how new policies regarding student visas, coupled with cuts to federal funding for universities, are severely disrupting America’s innovation economy. “The whole innovation ecosystem we have in America has been the best since World War II and has created this tremendous economy for the country. A great deal of that economy has to do with federal funding of research, doing it in a nonpoliticized way, and having the best people come from other countries to America to study with us, and to learn with us,” says Reif. “All of that ecosystem is being affected, and that makes it very uncomfortable for the experts who came here, to be here, to study here, and to stay here.” 

In a video, Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw speaks to NBC News about floating, magnetic tiles that could be used to build structures in space. “We could self-assemble these [tiles] on the Moon,” says Ekblaw. “We could make habitats for the Artemis program. Once we have this idea of modular space tiles, there’s so many different things that we can do with self-assembly.”  

The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja spotlights research led by Prof. Dennis Whyte on the economics of fusion energy. “Economic Q, the metric devised by Whyte and others and which must exceed one to represent net economic gain, compares the capital gained over a fusion energy plant’s lifetime to that expended,” writes Ahuja. “Factors reflect the extreme engineering involved and include construction costs, component durability and the efficiency of converting fusion power into a commodity.” 

In an opinion piece for Fast Company, Hala Hanna, Executive Director of MIT Solve, outlines a blueprint for solving the world’s hardest problems in the next decade. “The last decade rewarded whoever could invent the best solution. The next one will belong to whoever can build the conditions for good solutions to survive, spread, and rewire the systems around them,” writes Hanna.  

MIT researchers have developed a framework to determine what is needed to make fusion energy commercially viable, writes World Nuclear News (WNN). “The parameters in the framework describe engineering features of the fusion power plant such as power density, the efficiency of converting fusion power into an economic product, and the durability of components used in the energy conversion, in addition to costing and market parameters that assess the expenses and returns from invested capital,” explains WNN.  

Prof. Dennis Whyte and Prof. Andrew Lo have built a framework to mitigate the economic challenges of fusion power, writes Interesting Engineering’s Ameya Paleja. “While there are multiple approaches to building a nuclear fusion facility, Whyte and colleagues believe that at the end of the day, the facility should be in a position to generate more money that has gone in to building and operating it, otherwise it won’t last for long,” writes Paleja. 

MIT spinoff Found Industries’ new Cambridge headquarters and metals processing development center is highlighted by Boston Business Journal's Lucia Maffei. “We are developing electrochemical processes to recover gallium and, in time, indium, and germanium, and antimony and other critical metals directly from existing industrial streams,” says Peter Godart PhD ‘21, Found Industries CEO.  

Principal Research Scientist John Liu speaks to Manufacturing Dive’s Nathan Owens about MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long certificate program designed to "bring experienced technicians into leadership roles with a focus on advanced manufacturing needs.” Says Liu: "We’re looking at developing this elite workforce who bridges the gap. What we’re trying to do is upskill the technician.” 

Bloomberg’s Gautam Mukunda highlights Prof. Scott Stern’s finding that 0.07% of business registrations in the 2010s reached meaningful acquisition within six years, and Prof. Danielle Li and Prof. Lindsey Raymond’s finding that AI technologies increased customer support agent productivity by 15%, to predict AI’s role in the influx of business applications filed in June.  

MIT researchers have developed a low temperature process to extract battery-grade lithium from spodumene, the most common type of mineral containing lithium, using a reusable liquid reagent, writes Electronic Design’s Lee Goldberg. “The new process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts — not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica,” writes Goldberg. “After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so that waste levels approach zero.”