Cleantech Friday by Steve Guengerich

This week, we were in Boston making the rounds, with one of them being a stop at the world famous MIT Media Lab.  The Lab director, Frank Moss, along with his assistant Brian, was kind enough to host me both for a brief morning and afternoon session at the Lab.  Anyone that’s been in Austin for more than a year or two will remember Frank well, as the CEO and chairman who took Tivoli public and shortly thereafter orchestrated a successful merger with IBM for roughly $750 million in the late 1990s.

Frank took the job as director of the MIT Media Lab early in 2006 and is overseeing something of a reinvention of its mission and operations.  Call it MIT Media Lab 2.0.  Among the things he is doing is creating a much stronger set of relationships between the research of the Lab and the interests of its corporate sponsors.  And he is meeting with success – the place was a beehive of activity the day I was there, with Fortune 500 C-level executive teams and global consulting firm research partners packing the schedule of appointments.

Why?  The place is a feast of innovation!  We did a quick walking tour through just 5 of the labs in the building’s four stories and the amount of ideation is dizzying.  Of course, the City Car lab – interestingly enough, wedged into the same large space as the Lego projects – was among our favorites to see.  The goal is to get a working installation up & running for the Beijing Olympics next year.  Rather than try to explain all that it can do here, I encourage you to just browse the information about the City Car yourself.

It’s a timely topic, given that the first of the Fall program Austin Clean Tech Forums is next Wednesday night, September 19, and is focusing on the grid-connected vehicle.  Should be another great event in what has become *the* cleantech gathering in Central Texas for the broader business, public sector, and academic communities to network.  See you there!