It was a packed house at the MassChallenge finals last night in Boston’s Seaport District. Business luminaries such as Desh Deshpande, Steve Case, Josh Boger, Brad Feld, and Greg Bialecki were in attendance. And Boston mayor Tom Menino kicked things off by emphasizing that, especially compared with other innovation clusters around the country, “what Boston has is brainpower.”

Case, the co-founder of AOL and chairman and CEO of Revolution, stole the show early. A few gems from his keynote:

—“Big companies mostly play defense. Entrepreneurs create the future of this country…They are, in some sense, American heroes.”

—When Case was an undergrad at Williams College, he applied to Harvard Business School: “They rejected me…No donations headed that way!”

—In the early days of AOL, Case entered an Inc. 500 national competition: “I lost to Outback Steakhouse. The Bloomin’ Onion kicked my butt. So I redoubled my efforts to make AOL the best performing stock of the ‘90s. Which is more than Outback Steakhouse can say.”

—“Think big, and think bold…There’s way too much incremental thinking. The real change [comes from] bigger bets that are harder and take longer. Err on the side of thinking big instead of miniaturizing.”

But the real stars on this evening were the 26 MassChallenge finalists who gave one-minute pitches for their companies. Nobody tried anything particularly daring or unusual in their presentations—which is too bad, because the final awards had already been decided, so they had nothing to lose. Their pitches were pretty conventional (and polished for the most part) spiels for their companies. One of my takeaways is, once you’ve seen enough of these presentations, you can tell most of what you need to know in one minute.

In the end, four startups won $100,000 each, and 12 startups won $50,000 each. The companies were refreshingly diverse in terms of their focus, but there were lots of familiar names; … Next Page »

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Late last year a fire destroyed the biochemistry department at the Southern University of Chile and dealt a severe blow to its researchers. But thanks to Seeding Labs, a non-profit based in Cambridge, MA, the labs might soon be up and running again. The organization collects discarded lab equipment, sorts and packs it, and ships it to scientific institutions in developing countries.

“We see ourselves as a kind of angel investor,” says Seeding Lab founder and executive director, geneticist Nina Dudnik. “We can give our fellow scientists in developing countries a kick-start. The equipment makes it possible to get research done, publish articles, attract international funding and in the end build a self-sustaining lab through international grants.”

Seeding Labs was started five years ago by a group of graduate science students at Harvard. Almost all of the founders had worked in developing countries.

“I had worked at an agricultural research institute in the Ivory Coast in West Africa which had a molecular biology department,” Dudnik says. “When I came to Harvard I was struck by the stark differences in resources. Here, if you need something, you can order it in the morning and it comes the next day. In West Africa we would have to wait for months. Often the only way to get reagents was to ask a colleague who was going to a conference to pick them up.”

So far, Seeding Labs has sent equipment to 20 labs in 12 countries in Latin America and in Africa. The recipients—or their co-sponsors—pay for the shipping.

During its early years, Seeding Labs got its equipment from the academic sector, mainly from Harvard. But this year the organization has also started to collect used hardware and unused supplies from the private sector.

“We got an incredible generous donation from Biogen Idec—It consisted of lab equipment and consumables sufficient to send to five labs,” Dudnik says.

The Biogen Idec donation was organized by Mahin Aratsu, at the company’s neurobiology discovery department in Cambridge. “A co-worker had seen a flyer from Seeding Labs and had brought it over,” says Aratsu. “I thought it was a perfect opportunity to clean up our labs and get rid of equipment and send it over to places that would probably use it a lot more than we did. It turned out that our immunology department did something similar after we did, and we are hoping to continue this on at least every couple of years.”

The supplies and equipment collected at Biogen Idec range from test tubes and petri dishes to centrifuges and gel electrophoresis systems. After being packed up by a group of about thirty volunteers, part of the donation is now in Seeding Labs’ warehouse, waiting to be shipped to the Southern University of Chile.

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