Don’t know about you, but I’m less interested in Facebook’s IPO than I am in the efforts of people trying to find the next Facebook out of Boston/Cambridge. One such effort is the new Experiment Fund, based at Harvard University, which I wrote about earlier this week.

Turns out there’s more to the latest seed-stage fund in Boston than initially meets the eye. I had a chance to speak with the Experiment Fund’s co-founders, Hugo Van Vuuren of Harvard and Patrick Chung, a partner at Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates (not that Patrick Chung, that Patrick Chung).

They clarified the goals of the new fund and provided some more context around how it plans to distinguish itself from other similar efforts. I’ve also talked with a number of other early-stage investors around town and have gotten a better sense of how the Experiment Fund is being received locally (more on that below).

First, some mechanics of the fund, which has been in the works for about two years. Harvard has no financial stake and will have no say in the fund’s investment decisions, but it has provided support and office space, Van Vuuren says. He declined to specify the projected size of the fund, but he said it plans to make four to six new investments over the next two years, each in roughly the $100,000 to $250,000 range.

The Experiment Fund has already invested in four companies: Rock Health (see my colleague Wade’s stories here and here), Omada Health, Punch Media, and Tivli. Interestingly, only Tivli is based in the Boston area. Rock Health and Omada are in San Francisco, and Punch Media is in the DC area. They all were started by Harvard students—the key ingredient for now—but the fund intends to invest in teams from other schools around Boston and the East Coast, as well. So I’m guessing its next four investments will be pretty different from its first four, at least geographically.

“We want to meet them here,” Chung says. “We want to help you right here in Boston where the ideas were first born, where the team was put together.”

One issue they wanted to address was the notion that the fund is … Next Page »

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Last Thursday and Friday, leaders of entrepreneurial studies programs from seven Michigan universities met in Lansing for the Michigan Entrepreneurship Leaders Forum, where they discussed what’s working in their individual programs, how they might be able to collaborate in the future, and how all of their efforts might help boost the state’s economy.

“I’ve been in the business school since 1983, and I can’t remember hosting a joint event like this in 30 years,” says Shawnee K. Vickery, co-director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Demmer Legacy Fellow at Michigan State University. “If it’s happened before, it’s happened rarely.”

Joining Vickery at the summit, which was held at the Henry Executive Development Center, were Tim Faley, managing director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan (pictured above); Deb Zellner, executive director of the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship at Central Michigan University; Stephanie Newell of the College of Business at Eastern Michigan University; J. Kevin McCurren of the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University; Margaret Williams, interim dean of Wayne State University’s School of Business; and Timothy B. Palmer, interim director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Western Michigan University. Officials from Michigan Technological University were invited and expected to attend, but were snowed in at the last minute.

“This kind of meeting is way unusual, though it’s more natural for entrepreneurial programs,” Faley says. “We already interface with the community, so it’s not a big stretch to say, ‘Let’s include other schools.’ It’s not like we’re competing directly—we can learn from them and they can learn from us. But most departments are more insular and don’t work this way.”

Both Vickery and Faley agreed that the meeting went well and spoke highly of all the participants. Topics of discussion included how they might come together on events and community-oriented proposals, or leverage each other’s strengths.

“It was really a shot in the arm to see how we can all share with each other to help our sister institutions be successful,” Vickery says. “It’s inspiring to see how much is going on across the state. It provided a great venue for us to share ideas, best practices, and what we’re doing to inculcate an entrepreneurial mindset whether we’re working on our own or trying to infuse a corporate workspace.”

Faley echoed those sentiments, and said he was surprised to learn, for instance, that Central Michigan has a 300-person undergraduate program in entrepreneurialism.

All participants agreed to meet again in May, where Faley expects something more concrete to come out of the summit as opposed to last week’s gathering, which was mostly spent sharing “baseline information.”

“Why did this work? Because of everybody’s desire to be collaborative,” Faley points out. “There was none of the usual posturing. Everybody honestly wants to improve what they’re doing at their school.”

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When last we checked in with Gordon Jones, it was six months ago and he had just been appointed the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab. It was May, the birds were singing, the Red Sox had pulled out of their season-starting slump, and anything seemed possible.

Now the cold, dark days are upon us, and we need a place to rejuvenate our spirits as we gear up for the holiday season. Students and young entrepreneurs especially need such a place. The Harvard i-lab, as it is called, might be that place—a $20 million center whose mission is to support all Harvard students interested in entrepreneurship. And it is officially open for business as of today, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, school administrators, and politicians.

The important news is that the i-lab is real, and it marks a serious and ambitious effort to foster entrepreneurship on a grand scale. The unstated goal is to keep the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg from leaving town (and Harvard) and building a multibillion-dollar company somewhere else. Will it work? Who knows, but you have to start somewhere.

Back in May, Jones talked with me about just trying to get his baby to first grade—the idea being, walk before you run. He has been heads-down since then, but I recently caught up with him about the i-lab’s opening, and the progress and challenges to date. (And yes, he hosted Zuckerberg’s recent visit to the lab.)

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Jones says. “It’s genuine, the interest here, and the level of engagement across the Harvard schools is strong.” He says that the overall support from the university and the enthusiasm from the academic and business communities “exceeds what I expected.”

Jones adds, “When we first talked six months ago, there was this question of, ‘Is Harvard late to the game?’ I think this is a great time to be doing what Harvard is doing.” And that is, in his words, “trying to bring the best of Harvard’s knowledge and network and make it available to students. And being part of the Boston innovation community.”

Here are my takeaways going into the first day of school at the i-lab:

1. Jones isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he has an extremely challenging job. (You try being accountable to seven different deans across Harvard, for starters.) The fact that he’s still alive and kicking—not to mention attending lots of entrepreneurship events and getting to know students and the local business community at every turn—bodes well for the lab’s future. “You’ve got to pick your battles,” he says.

2. The lab is already active. It officially opens today, but stuff has been happening there for months already: a “startup weekend scramble,” guest speakers (the series includes Eric Ries, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Taylor), Harvard courses on entrepreneurship and global innovation, special panels, startup workshops (Alex Taussig led one about mistakes entrepreneurs make; Eric Paley did one on career choices), and one-on-one consultations with “experts in residence” and “innovation partners” … Next Page »

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When I entered Harvard as a freshman, there was no central focus on startups or entrepreneurs. Student groups were splintered and stagnating, and there were no main faculty members whom I could approach about entrepreneurship. I was intimidated to approach students or faculty from Harvard’s graduate schools, and there was no cross-campus collaboration. Harvard’s startup scene was almost completely underground. Students worked on their “side projects” alone in their dorm rooms. As far as I can tell, that pattern of the insular Harvard entrepreneur has been true for years.

Yet despite all of these hurdles, Harvard has graduated some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Everyone knows of Zuckerberg and Gates dropping out. But what about Tony Hsieh (College ’95), co-founder of LinkExchange and CEO of Zappos.com? Or Tim O’Reilly (College ’75), founder of O’Reilly Media? And what about Scott McNealy (College ’76), co-founder of Sun Microsystems, or social entrepreneurs like Paul Farmer (HMS ’88, Ph.D. ’90), founder of Partners in Health? Do we consider Trip Hawkins (College ’76), founder of Electronic Arts; Mark Warner (HLS ’80), co-founder of Nextel Communications; or Thomas Stemberg (HBS ’73), co-founder of Staples?

These individuals demonstrate two distinct facts about entrepreneurship: first, it’s not necessary to drop out of school to found and grow an amazingly successful enterprise. Second, Harvard has been the birthplace of innovations across industries since its inception.

On Friday, Harvard enters the next era in its quest to graduate successful entrepreneurs, when the Harvard Innovation Lab officially opens its doors. It is both a new facility and new programming that promises to help Harvard students take their ideas as far as they can go. The 30,000 square foot space features a large and easily re-configured space for students to work on their ideas. Nearly every wall is covered with whiteboard paint for students to sketch out their plans. Conference rooms give students more privacy, and a large classroom will host workshops and classes that help students hone their entrepreneurial abilities. Programs already underway include workshops, classes, access to experts-in-residence, mentoring, and student co-working areas. Many of the events and resources are open to the Boston community as a whole.

There has never been a more exciting time to be a student entrepreneur. College is inherently an environment ripe with new connections. During a conversation at 2 AM or a random meeting with a professor, ideas are born. And in a city as alive with innovation as Boston, students have no excuse not to find an idea and run with it.

It’s easy for new university initiatives to launch and be forgotten. The innovation lab is different. The i-lab wasn’t only created to generate interest in entrepreneurship; it was developed to serve the immense interest already present in the student body. The i-lab is here to stay.

So on Friday, welcome the Harvard innovation lab to the Harvard and Boston communities. Stop by and take a look around. Most importantly, speak to some of the students working there. You’ll like what you hear.

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Between the FutureM conference, Web Innovators Group, Mobile Monday, the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, and the MIT tech festival t=0, there wasn’t a lot of time for Boston techies to breathe last week.

To keep you up to date, here are some high-level takeaways from FutureM, the sprawling MITX event that was really 50-plus separate events, focused on the future of marketing—and with a lot of Boston-area companies represented. This is just a small sample of what I saw and heard from a few panels and gatherings:

1. Ad tech sucks. For consumers, that is. Lots of startups and big companies are trying to make it suck less. That was the message from Sim Simeonov, the entrepreneur and angel investor behind Shopximity, a young Boston-area startup that’s trying to improve consumers’ shopping experience using display ads.

2. The frontiers of mobile marketing are automation, engagement, and transparency. Automating the marketing process is key in a world of near-unlimited Web content and cheap ad prices. So is getting (and keeping) people’s attention. “The trend we’re going to see is around making it more clear why [a consumer] would want to explore an ad,” said Lars Albright, a veteran of m-Qube, Quattro Wireless, and Apple. (His new startup is called Session M.) It remains to be seen whether a billion-dollar business can emerge from this sector, however. Albright would bet on Apple’s iAd network reaching $1B, while Paul McNulty of IBM’s enterprise marketing division (he’s from Unica) said, “I don’t know if [a marketing automation company] is the horse I’d bet on as the next EMC.” (I took that to mean because there are lots of different companies with complementary strengths, it’s hard to imagine one big category winner.)

3. “California is a one-night stand, while Massachusetts is a long-term relationship.” That was Senator Karen Spilka (D-Mass.) summarizing the views of a panel of entrepreneurs and investors on building companies in the Bay State versus Silicon Valley. “We’re still number one in education,” she said. “And number two in [venture capital] as a small state is pretty good.” (Alas, non-compete laws are also part of the long-term relationship here. Interestingly, Brian Shin of Visible Measures noted that his thinking on non-competes has changed, presumably from positive to negative: it sounds like he originally thought they would be helpful in retaining a core group of top employees in the state.)

4. Diversity in tech is a challenge and an opportunity. Investor Eric Paley of Founder Collective noted that young entrepreneurs in New York and Silicon Valley “can rattle off names of success stories.” Whereas in Boston, people don’t hear much about companies like EnerNOC, Acme Packet, EqualLogic, and Unica, “because we’re so distributed” across different sectors, he said. “It’s the diversity and the modesty.” Case in point: On the panel, Paley asked Brian Shin if he knew of Unica, the marketing tech firm that would be bought by IBM for $480 million last year, back when Shin was starting Visible Measures in 2005. “I didn’t know any company,” Shin said. On the other hand, he said that “because there is diversity, you can find [a mentor] who’s done something big in almost anything you want to do.”

5. Connecting students with startups, perhaps with VC or government support, is key to the state’s tech future. It’s a well-known issue: top kids go to school in Boston and then leave for the West Coast or New York to join hot startups, or they become business consultants. “We should be insanely aggressive about internships,” Paley said, for undergrads, grad students, and MBAs alike. That means championing broad efforts to get young people who are interested in entrepreneurship (there seem to be more and more lately) to work at local companies for the summer. That echoes something Jon Pierce told me a few months ago: “Working at a startup is the best education you can have as an entrepreneur.”

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At Wayne State University, labs aren’t just a sterile space for solemn experiments. For students in the school’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD), it’s a chance to work directly with their instructors, get a taste of the scientific life, and gather some up-close career advice in the process.

“The laboratory setting is almost like a kitchen,” says Joseph Dunbar, WSU’s associate vice president for research and the program’s director. “They can ask questions, interact … there’s not as much of a chasm between students and faculty. They see what’s possible, and it gives them confidence to talk about their careers in an intimate fashion.”

Last month, the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year grant of more than $3 million to support the IMSD program, which seeks to nurture student interest in scientific careers by providing them with opportunities to participate in behavioral and biomedical research projects.

Dunbar says the original idea behind the program was getting more ethnic minority students to work on scientific research projects. Wayne State was a natural fit for the program: When the IMSD program started in 1978, many students came from auto industry families and were the first in their familes to go to college.

“In metro Detroit, you had multiple generations of families working for the auto industry, and you’d grow up, go to high school, and then go to Mr. Ford or Mr. GM for a job—that’s just how it was done,” Dunbar says. “But those jobs are probably never coming back, and we know that America’s next move forward probably involves science and technology.”

At Wayne State, the program has supported more than 700 students so far. As of 2010, 390 undergraduates in the program had gone on to complete bachelor’s degrees, 64 had obtained master’s degrees, and 68 had gone on to complete doctorates. Some of the post-IMSD careers have been noteworthy. Eric Ansorge, who did research at WSU on heart failure through the program, is now an Army major in charge of a large biomedical research program. … Next Page »

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Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

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Whether you’re part of the Boston-Cambridge technology community, or just an interested observer, you’ve probably been to the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (known affectionately as NERD) at least a few times in the past year. But do you know what Microsoft is actually working on there? I didn’t.

Until last week, that is, when I visited Microsoft Research New England, one of the main groups at NERD, housed near Kendall Square. The tower at One Memorial Drive rises majestically from the banks of the Charles River, but it guards its secrets closely. Jennifer Chayes, the managing director of Microsoft Research New England, which occupies the 12th floor, reveals the projects her group is working on slowly. But she does reveal them.

OK, it’s an open research lab with hundreds of visitors and collaborators from academia and industry, so secrecy isn’t the culture here—at least, not amongst the research community. But from the lab’s opening in 2008 until now, Chayes, an expert in discrete mathematics, networks, and game theory, has said very little to the technology and business media about what her teams have been working on—and what it all has to do with Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) business. And that’s just fine, because I’m about to tell you.

Microsoft Research New England is three years old this month. Although the full-time research staff has doubled in size since inception, it’s still a fairly small operation—12 staff researchers (including deputy managing director Christian Borgs), another dozen postdocs, a half-dozen software development engineers and support staff, and any number of students and interns. Their research breaks down into six main areas—computer science (including algorithms, cryptography, machine learning and vision, and security), computational biology, economics, mathematics, networks, and social media. (Microsoft declined to say how much it has invested in the lab so far.)

It’s not a typical lineup for a Microsoft research lab, of which there are six worldwide, including the mother lab in Redmond, WA. “Our lab has gone into certain areas that haven’t been nearly as emphasized by the other [Microsoft Research labs]. Most of them are fantastically strong in mainstream computer science disciplines,” Chayes says. “One of the reasons for opening the lab here was because we wanted to help advance the state of the art at the boundaries between computer science and other fields. And Cambridge is a place—of course it’s very strong in computer science—that’s phenomenally strong in other fields.”

Take empirical economics. Susan Athey, the renowned Harvard economist (and Microsoft consultant), heads up a year-old group in the lab that’s focused on analyzing huge datasets that Microsoft has access to—things like online advertising trends and performance, search-engine user behaviors, Xbox Live networks, e-mail and instant-messaging patterns, healthcare trends, and so on. Chayes pitched the idea for the economics group to CEO Steve Ballmer in December 2009, and he said to go for it.

The group’s goal is to find patterns in databases that could make various systems more efficient. Little did they know this would lead to the lab’s first technology to become a Microsoft product. … Next Page »

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We know you’re out there.

You have gripes about the way innovation is done, in Boston or beyond—or ideas for how to make entrepreneurship and innovation even better.

Maybe one of those pet peeves is that Silicon Valley is poaching all the hot young tech talent from the East Coast. We get it. We’ve all heard about it, read about it, talked about it, written about it. But that gripe probably won’t get you on stage at XSITE (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which will take place on June 16, at Babson College.

You heard me. We’re offering you a public platform to sound off your discontent with, or your best idea for, entrepreneurship: whether it’s surrounding funding, tech talent, government support, R&D, academia, or office space. You tell us.

We want some of the snarkiest, most passionate people we can find—with real, legitimate concerns and ideas—who can stir up the pot before we all break for lunch next Thursday. We will choose a few people—two or three, say—with the most original and interesting rants or recommendations to share their views with the XSITE audience and gain even more fame by being written up in Xconomy. If you haven’t already registered and we choose you, you ‘ll get a free ticket to the event. If you have already registered, we’ll let you bring a guest. And either way, you’ll also get a $25 coupon for use on Gilt, the high-end fashion site co-founded by one of the XSITE speakers.

So email us (ekutz@xconomy.com, or editors@xconomy.com). Tell us what you’d like to sound off about and why. This soapbox portion of this day is supposed to be electric, so don’t hold back.

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Let’s see if this produces some much-needed new drugs for Pfizer’s pipeline.

The New York City-based pharmaceutical giant (NYSE: PFE) announced today it is starting a five-year, $100 million research collaboration in Boston with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard University, Partners HealthCare, Tufts Medical Center, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

The partnerships are part of Pfizer’s broader R&D network, called the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (also in New York and San Francisco), which aim to close the gap between basic research and clinical trials of new drug candidates. Pfizer said it has signed a lease for lab space at the Center for Life Science in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, which will serve as the headquarters for the R&D network. The Boston program’s $100 million price tag includes support for research programs, potential milestone payments to partners, and operational costs of the new lab.

Back in January, Pfizer announced a research initiative involving seven medical institutions in the New York area. That move, which came on the heels of a similar announcement in San Francisco, was made in conjunction with a new lease at the Alexandria Center for Life Science, a biotech park on the East River in Manhattan.

These research partnerships are part of a broader effort by Pfizer to boost its R&D efforts—a mission that’s becoming all the more urgent as its patent for the blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor approaches its expiration later this year (anticipated in November). The challenge of getting new drugs into the pipeline is shared by many other big companies, including Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, and Merck, and remains a fundamental problem for the pharmaceutical industry.

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Commencement season is coming to a close, which means a lot of students and recent graduates are leaving town. That might be a good thing if you’re trying to get a seat at Crema Café near Harvard or Flour Bakery near MIT, but it ain’t good for local startups.

The brain drain of Boston-area tech grads leaving for the West Coast is well-worn territory. Talented developers, fresh out of school, are taking high-paying jobs with big companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Groupon, none of which are headquartered in Boston. Ambitious young entrepreneurs move to Silicon Valley to seek their fortunes—and are sometimes encouraged by their faculty mentors to do so. How can the local innovation community turn things around?

Cultivating local talent is, in fact, one of the main topics being covered at today’s “Building a Better Commonwealth” forum, organized by the Boston Globe.

A trio of leaders I’ve spoken with recently have also added their perspectives to the conversation. Each of them is tackling the startup brain-drain issue from a different angle. Yet they all agree local universities are the place to start, as the quality (and sheer number) of schools represents a competitive advantage for the Boston area over other parts of the country.

Jon Pierce is an unassuming guy who is trying to lead a grass-roots revolution—in angel investing. The techie/hacker/entrepreneur is organizing the second annual “Angel Bootcamp” in Cambridge next Tuesday, June 14. The goal is to get angel investors excited about pouring their hard-earned dollars back into the local startup community. Yet Pierce recognizes that the talent and idea spring lies further upstream, especially in the fields of consumer Web and mobile technologies.

Pierce says universities “are our best chance of improving things quickly.” That means finding new ways to harness the entrepreneurial talents of students and faculty; building stronger ties between schools and local tech companies; and encouraging students to do internships (and seek jobs) at Boston-area startups. “Working at a startup is the best education you can have as an entrepreneur,” he says.

Of course, all these things are already happening at local schools. But Gordon Jones, the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, slated to open this fall, represents a new effort to ratchet up the intensity of collaborations on campus. It may be unspoken, but the big idea behind the i-lab is to keep the next Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft), or Tony Hsieh (Zappos) from leaving town.

“The promise is to be a home for entrepreneurs at Harvard,” Jones told me last month.

Which brings us to perhaps the most ambitious talent-building and entrepreneurship program in Boston today. MassChallenge, a nonprofit incubator in its second year, aims to run “the world’s largest startup competition” and prove that in Massachusetts, “you can make a startup machine that just produces startups,” says John Harthorne, who leads MassChallenge as CEO. (The program recently announced its 125 finalist companies, which have entered a summer mentorship program and will compete for substantial cash prizes in the fall.)

I asked Harthorne about the role of local colleges in fostering transformative new business ideas—and keeping them local, instead of encouraging them to skip town. “Universities are clearly the foundation of innovation for Massachusetts,” he says. In part through MassChallenge’s progress in attracting attention and resources, he says, “We’ve raised Boston and Massachusetts in the ranks of options. We’re in the top three [of places to recommend building a company] across all the professors and schools. It gives us an at-bat. We’ve demonstrated an incredibly collaborative environment.”

Harthorne was talking mostly about the MassChallenge program, but his comments might just as well apply to Boston’s broader ecosystem, especially for those coming out of school: “We’ve never been this well-positioned,” he says. “All the lights are green.”

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He says he is “part entrepreneur, part educator…part ambassador, part politician.” Who is this masked man?

He’s Gordon Jones, the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, and until last week many people in the startup community might not have known who he was. I’m just starting to get to know him, having talked with him on the phone from the West Coast (where he was earlier this week). So this isn’t going to be a rigorous analysis of his new job or anything, but let’s just say the man has his work cut out for him. Given all the twists and turns in what he calls his “custom-created career,” I’m betting he just might be up to the task.

The Harvard Innovation Lab is a new, $20 million center for entrepreneurship that is slated to open this fall. The 30,000-square-foot space, still under construction, is located where WGBH-TV’s studios used to be in Allston. The “i-lab” will house classrooms and meeting space for students, faculty, investors, and local businesses, as well as provide business development resources and develop new classes and programs focused on innovation. It will also operate as a nonprofit incubator of new companies. The broader goal, Jones says, is to encourage entrepreneurship and commercialization across all of Harvard’s various schools—arts and sciences, engineering and applied science, business, law, and government.

“The promise is to be a home for entrepreneurs at Harvard,” he says.

And the unstated goal? To keep the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Tony Hsieh—all Harvard undergrads at some point—from moving his or her company (Microsoft, Facebook, Zappos) out of Boston. Harvard thinks it’s found the man to lead the effort.

Jones, 42, is a former marketing and sales exec and an expert in consumer goods. He talks like every well-polished MBA you’ve ever known. But he brings real experience selling real stuff you can get your hands around—everything from Oral-B toothbrushes and newfangled dental floss, to window and glass scraper tools, to a “mosquito magnet” that uses propane and a catalytic converter to keep pests away. He has done time at Gillette, American Biophysics, and Universal Pest Solutions, and he has experience selling to international markets like Asia and Latin America. All of that will be useful in advising student teams on product-market fit and building partnerships with businesses across a wide range of industries.

“Fundamentally, I have such respect for R&D groups, whether they’re people working on toothbrushes or coders working on technology,” he says.

Jones also brings some more recent educational experience. He has taught marketing and entrepreneurship at Bentley University since 2007, and also works with Harvard Business School’s admissions office. He says he hopes to cultivate an environment where student entrepreneurs think big and “celebrate the journey.” And that applies across different levels of interest—from students who are curious about entrepreneurship to those in the idea stage seeking mentorship, to … Next Page »

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I’ve been flat-out for the past week or so. Here are three pieces of Boston-area tech news that are worth catching up on, and a few thoughts on each:

—Fig Card, the mobile payments company that just started last year, was acquired by eBay, via its PayPal division, for an undisclosed sum. Co-founders Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (one of the better names around town) have joined PayPal’s mobile division. My colleague Wade profiled another one of Metral’s and Granbery’s creative projects, Povo, back in 2008, introducing it thusly: “Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.” These guys look like a great addition to PayPal, which is increasingly focused on mobile commerce (see its recent acquisition of Boston location-based services firm Where).

It’s a fairly small deal, but it raises a couple of big questions on both coasts. Is PayPal getting ready to split off from eBay? And who’s the next mobile company to get bought in Boston? (I have my guess, but I’m not telling yet.)

—Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers launched in 2006 by Jeff Taylor, was scooped up by San Francisco-based Crew Media for an undisclosed price. Eons has been shrinking in recent years, and it spun off its more successful obituaries business, Tributes.com, in 2008. Former Eons employees have told me that the company failed for a number of reasons, ranging from “50 year olds are not viral” to classic startup mistakes like “taking too much money and hiring too fast before you get traction.”

—Audio firm Bose announced on Friday that founder Amar Bose has given MIT the majority of the stock in the company, in the form of non-voting shares. Financial details weren’t given. Professor Bose is an MIT “lifer” who served on the Institute’s faculty for 45 years, retiring in 2001. MIT, which is now the majority owner of Bose Corporation, will receive annual cash dividends on those shares, but has no control over the company and its operations and cannot sell the shares.

A story in the New York Times raised tax questions about the gift, but didn’t resolve the issue. The Times quotes Nate Nickerson, an MIT spokesman (and a former editor at Technology Review), as saying the gift was “very significant” and that the dividends will be “used broadly to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission.”

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Harvard University announced today that Gordon Jones will be the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, a $20 million community center for entrepreneurship that’s slated to open this fall at WGBH-TV’s former offices in Allston. The goal of the lab is to foster startups and interactions among students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and the local community. Jones was previously a marketing and sales executive with Universal Pest Solutions, American Biophysics, and Gillette, and has worked with Harvard Business School’s admissions office. He also serves as a business advisor to a number of startups. He officially starts on May 9.

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Seventeen companies in 18 years. That’s about as prolific as any entrepreneur-VC partnership in history. And when you’re talking about an MIT Institute Professor (and his collaborators) and the co-founder of Polaris Venture Partners (and his colleagues), that adds significant weight to the achievement.

Earlier this month, Bob Langer from MIT and Terry McGuire from Polaris treated Xconomy and our “VC65” event audience to a discussion of their collaboration over the years. They talked about their formula for creating and building life sciences companies based around six elements: platform technologies, tangible products, pioneering science, patents, real data, and a collaborative team environment. (You can also check out video of an earlier in-depth chat with Langer and McGuire, moderated by my colleague Wade, for more on how the duo goes about building companies.)

McGuire also presented a series of slides that captured the history and impact of the two-decade collaboration (see below). Call it the Langer-Polaris family tree—it shows their 17 startups in roughly chronological order (newer ones at the top), with branches that signify contributions from key collaborators and founders such as MIT’s Michael Cima (MicroCHIPS, TransForm, T2, Taris) and Ram Sasisekharan (Momenta, Cerulean, Visterra), and Harvard’s David Edwards (AIR, Pulmatrix).

“To be clear, I am not the only Polaris person to work with Bob, and some of the branches of the tree lead to companies where Bob is not the principal founder (such as Cerulean),” McGuire told me via e-mail. “Still, they all started with the relationship to Langer.”

From what I can tell, all the companies are either still in business or have been acquired—which is impressive in itself. Still, it’s hard to say if there has been a home run among the companies yet (we’re willing to give them a little more time). Some of the bigger financial hits have included AIR (bought by Alkermes for more than $100 million in 1999), Momenta Pharmaceuticals (IPO in 2004), and TransForm Pharmaceuticals (bought by Johnson & Johnson for $230 million in 2005).

Here are three snapshots of the company tree: The first shows the scientists and Polaris VCs involved with each company; the second shows the types of therapy they’re developing; and the third shows the companies’ potential impact on patient populations (a total of more than 1 billion lives potentially affected).

Companies and founders:

Primary therapeutic areas:

Potential lives touched (estimates of patient populations, in millions):

And below is a full list of the 17 companies, with links to our coverage:

Acusphere (NASDAQ: ACUS)

AIR (Advanced Inhalation Research, acquired by Alkermes in 1999)

Arsenal Medical

BIND Biosciences

Cerulean Pharma (formerly Tempo Pharma)

Kala Pharmaceuticals

Living Proof

MicroCHIPS

Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MNTA)

Pervasis Therapeutics

Pulmatrix

Selecta Biosciences

Seventh Sense Biosystems

T2 Biosystems

Taris Biomedical

TransForm Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2005)

Visterra (formerly Parasol Therapeutics)

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Besides snow and rain (and other April Fool’s jokes), ‘tis the season for business plan competitions around Boston. You might know all about MIT’s $100K contest and Harvard Business School’s equivalent, but there’s a lot more going on out there—and a lot of talented young people vying for a taste of entrepreneurial success.

Here’s a quick sampling of five university-based contests going on around town, and their finalists (certainly not a comprehensive list):

—Tufts University is running its seventh annual $100K business plan competition. The final pitches are happening next week, April 6. Here are the five finalists in the social entrepreneurship bracket: Educate Lanka (student scholarships, Manjula Dissanayake), Give 2App (smartphone apps for nonprofits, Artem Efremkin and Shabazz Stuart), Kabuk (earthquake kits, Mustafa Tuzcu), Saathi (sanitary pads, Nithyaa Venkataramani), and Sanergy (green toilets, Gaurav Tiwari).

And the six finalists in the classic competition: InstaCard (cash in gift cards, Warren Davis), Rentcycle (local business rentals, Kevin Halter and Sean Zinsmeister), Roof For Two (motorcycle accessories, Andrew Altman), RxCap (smart pill containers, Nathan Scott), Salary View (college career services, Kenny Berlin), and Saves on a Plane (airfare deals, Ade Baptista).

—Babson College, which says it founded the first college business plan competition in 1984, is in the midst of its $100K+ undergraduate and graduate business plan competitions. The final round takes place on April 14. Here’s a rundown of the three graduate finalists: Atiken Renewables (agricultural waste to energy), Golden Health Guide (online reviews of home medical products), and SkyCrepers (fast-serve crepe franchise).

And the three undergrad finalists: Down to Earth Waste Solutions (small-business waste collection and composting), Nodes (online collaboration and group social networking), and Redeemr (business intelligence and customer retention for small to businesses).

—Boston University’s $50K “new venture competition” is down to its final four, just like March Madness. The BU finals are next week, April 6. Here are the four finalists: ACCEasy (accounting software for Russian businesses, Katsiaryna Akhlopkava), Handlebikes (better bicycles, Fredrik Fjellsaa), Nyumba (pneumonia diagnostics by cellphone, Andrea Fernandes), and RayVio (efficient ultraviolet LEDs, Yitao Liao).

—The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition’s $100K business plan contest is well underway. The semi-finalist teams (five teams in five tracks, plus wild cards) are currently in their mentorship program hurtling towards the finish line on May 11. You can see a full list of the semi-finalists, which were announced in early March, here. A few that caught my eye, mostly because they have interesting names: SaferTaxi (mobile track; cab rating and registration system), iHelmet (products and services; no idea what they do), Boss (life sciences; bone graft tool), Waste to Watts (emerging markets; sounds self-explanatory for power generation), and All Cows Eat Grass (music lessons) and VisualizeMe (social graph), both in the Web/IT track.

—Lastly, Harvard Business School’s business plan contest is just getting started. Business plan entries are due next week, April 7; there’s a “business venture” track and a “social venture” track. The whole competition is done by the evening of April 26.

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If your name is Borya Shakhnovich, people tend to make assumptions about you. One, they don’t want to play you in competitive chess. Two, they wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you introduced yourself by saying something like, “I am scientist.”

OK, I’m stereotyping here (a real time-saver, I know), but at least one of those assumptions has some basis in fact. Shakhnovich is the founder and CEO of Brookline, MA-based iAMscientist, a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. He has raised $1 million in seed financing from angel investors including George Whitesides, the famed Harvard University chemist and co-founder of more than a dozen companies including Genzyme (which was acquired last week by Sanofi-Aventis for some $20 billion).

What iAMscientist does is give researchers and institutions some interesting new tools to connect with each other. The idea is to create an online community and directory of top-tier people so that research teams, companies, and other organizations can find the right person to answer a difficult question, decipher a new paper, or lead a research project. All of this is especially important for interdisciplinary ventures—like when biologists team up with physicists, computer scientists, or electrical engineers to model things like genetic pathways or disease mechanisms, and then someone wants to commercialize the findings.

“We provide an organization with the ability to find that one person who is the foremost expert in an obscure area—our value is in that matching mechanism,” Shakhnovich says. Some of the most valuable knowledge and experience that researchers have “isn’t really in their papers, it’s in their heads,” he says. “You want to get in touch with them and maintain a relationship.”

Academic social networks are not new, of course. Services like Academia.edu, Epernicus (Boston-based), Labmeeting (founded by a Harvard grad), Nature Network, Pronetos, ResearchGate (which started in Boston but recently moved to Germany), and, to some extent, LinkedIn, all help … Next Page »

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Internet tycoon Bob Metcalfe, who recently moved from Boston, is giving his first lecture as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin this afternoon. I don’t know exactly what he plans to say, but what’s particularly interesting is how he’s delivering the talk—to more than just the people in the room, through a virtual collaboration interface from Avaya, the New Jersey-based business communications firm. The technology is being led by an Avaya group with a strong presence in Boston.

Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet local-area networking standard, founder of 3Com, and partner at Polaris Venture Partners, moved to Austin for the faculty job earlier this month. He has been a mainstay of the Boston innovation scene for the past couple of decades. (For his part, he said he’s not leaving, he’s expanding—and he’ll still spend his summers in New England.)

The topic of his lecture will be “Enernet: Internet lessons for solving energy.” Reached by e-mail, Metcalfe says, “I will again urge that we all use the Internet to conserve energy: Transport your bits, not your atoms.”

Case in point: Metcalfe will speak not only in person to the audience in the UT auditorium, but also to remote viewers (who will see his avatar) using Avaya’s new system. The online platform, called web.alive, uses video-game graphics, immersive audio, and personalized avatars to create a 3-D virtual environment for business collaboration among remote participants. Metcalfe calls it “emersive collaboration through the Internet.” (The URL for the lecture has not been given out publicly; I’ll update this story if that changes.)

The point of web.alive is to do better than existing collaborative tools like video conferencing, which don’t let you move around in the remote environment or interact with people individually. So presumably you could ask Metcalfe’s avatar a question in an interactive way, or even greet him “in person” after his lecture (see image of the virtual auditorium below).

And web.alive is different from existing virtual worlds like Second Life, in that you can set up secure and private meeting areas. What’s more, you have an individualized audio mix through your headphones—so you can have a private conversation with someone in the back of the room, say, and not disturb the speaker (though his avatar might yell at you).

It’s still early days, but Avaya is signing up customers in industry and academia who seem eager to try it out. “Every person we’ve shown it to has wanted it,” says Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, who heads up the web.alive effort from Avaya’s Waltham, MA, office. As a start, he says, “We want to link up other universities.”

Ali says when he’s in the office, he conducts about half of his meetings in the web.alive environment. And Avaya uses it in-house for all of its leadership training courses and new-employee programs. “Over the next year, we mostly want to get people to use it,” Ali says. “Then at some point we have to figure out how to make money with it.”

Metcalfe says he will also use the Avaya system to hold “virtual” office hours, which will be open to his UT students as well as remote visitors. The first session will be tomorrow from 2-5 pm Central Time. If you have a Windows-based PC, you can check it out (and say hello to Metcalfe’s avatar) at utexas.avayalive.com.

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The MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, is running a special exhibition, starting this weekend, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT’s charter. The “MIT 150” exhibit showcases a collection of stories and artifacts that represent the institute’s contributions to science, technology, business, education, and society—things like Marvin Minsky’s robot arm, Claude Shannon’s maze-solving machine, J.C.R. Licklider’s Internet-presaging paper, Norbert Wiener’s letter describing a meeting with Albert Einstein, and much more.

The exhibit’s objects and themes were crowdsourced from the MIT community and organized by Deborah Douglas, curator of science and technology at the museum. It’s all part of a 150-day-long campus-wide celebration of MIT’s distinguished history. (Some sticklers for detail point out that MIT didn’t actually open its doors to students until 1865, so we might have to do all this celebrating over again in 2015.)

Here are a few items and links that caught my eye as being particularly relevant to MIT’s entrepreneurial legacy:

—The first business plan for Digital Equipment Corporation, and other items from American Research and Development Corporation, the equity investment firm co-founded by former MIT president Karl Compton (which originally invested $70,000 in DEC in 1957).

—Artifacts commemorating the 25,000-plus active companies around the world founded by MIT alumni and faculty.

—Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child “XO” Laptop, from 2002.

—MIT’s first patent policy, from 1932.

—Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto (1985), in response to companies making proprietary software.

—Project Athena (1983-1991), a joint project by MIT, IBM, and DEC to integrate computers into the university curriculum. (OK, I’m sentimental about my first e-mail account.)

There is a celebration at the museum for the MIT community today from 3:00-5:00 pm, and a public program on January 14. The MIT 150 exhibition officially opens to the public tomorrow.

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For some people, innovation is not enough. Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is one of those people. Let’s just say the Boston-area tech entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist has earned the right to make such a claim.

“For innovation to have impact, it needs relevance,” he says. “Innovation plus relevance equals impact.”

Deshpande is talking about global impact, but his latest project is in his own backyard. Last month, his foundation committed $5 million over the next five years to support a new innovation center housed at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Merrimack Valley Sandbox, as it’s called, will work together with local colleges and nonprofits to boost entrepreneurship among students and professionals, and to develop local leadership through mentoring and seed funding programs.

The new initiative has similarities to the Deshpande Center at MIT and a social entrepreneurship center Deshpande set up in northern Karnataka, India—with some big differences. But to understand what Deshpande is really trying to accomplish with the Merrimack project, you need to know more about his story.

Gururaj Deshpande grew up in India and studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (Chennai). He went on to do his PhD in data communications at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Starting in the late 1980s, he founded a series of successful technology companies—Coral Networks, Cascade Communications (which sold to Ascend Communications for $3.7 billion in 1997), Sycamore Networks (NASDAQ: SCMR), and Tejas Networks. He currently serves as chairman of Sycamore, Tejas, and A123Systems, among other top-level duties.

The success of Cascade and Sycamore made Deshpande a wealthy man, and he and his wife Jaishree set up the Deshpande Foundation in 1995. Its unifying theme has been to foster innovation ecosystems and social entrepreneurship. Its first major initiative was setting up the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT in 2002. That organization has been active in providing grants to MIT labs, connecting faculty with the business community, and more generally tying ivory- tower research to market realities.

“In society, thinkers all come together, and they come up with new ideas,” Deshpande says. “But as they keep coming up with new ideas, they have to play the game of impressing each other”—whether that means other professors or government funding agencies. “In the process they lose the ability to have impact,” he says, because of a lack of relevance to real-world problems (and products). “The center at MIT is about bringing that relevance.”

After a few years, Deshpande looked at setting up something similar in his native land. “But somehow doing nanotechnology in India didn’t sound that exciting,” he says. Instead, he thought, … Next Page »

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