MIT launches center to bridge research, industry

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By Elizabeth Heichler

(IDG) -- Aiming to simultaneously streamline funding for leading-edge technology research and make the resulting innovations more available to small, entrepreneurial companies, MIT last week launched the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.

Named for Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, chairman and co-founder of Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Sycamore Networks Inc., and his wife Jaishree, who have given $20 million to MIT for the seed funding, the center will award grants for research in areas including IT, nanotechnology and bioengineering.

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"Traditional funding mechanisms have become increasingly bureaucratized and risk-averse," said MIT President Charles Vest at the center's launch event in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The new center will "possibly create a new way of funding research in universities," Deshpande said.

The Deshpande Center also represents an effort by MIT to reach out to younger companies, especially in the northeastern U.S., and gives them a new mechanism for interacting with the institute, Vest said. "We've not been an easy institution to deal with if you're a young company," he said.

Outreach to industry will be an ongoing part of the center's activities, said Thomas Magnanti, dean of engineering at MIT. The Deshpande Center's steering committee will include venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who have insight about the potential for commercialization of research, as well as ties to the start-up community. And if small companies have a place to interact with MIT faculty and follow the research being done there, there will be someone ready and interested in licensing new technologies as projects are developed, he said.

One venture capitalist, contacted after the official launch, said the Deshpande Center should greatly facilitate the relationship between universities and commercial interests.

There has been a dearth of organizations bridging the two entities, said Steve Lazarus, managing general partner of Arch Venture Partners in Chicago, which focuses on commercializing technologies from universities and other research centers. "I greet this with pleasure and look forward to working with them," he said.

The Deshpande Center will provide an alternative source of funding to MIT faculty via two types of grants: $250,000 grants for "groundbreaking" research and $50,000 awards to support research into exciting but still-incipient technologies, said Magnanti.

In its first year, the center will award three of the larger grants and five smaller ones to selected respondees to a call for proposals that will be issued this spring. Magnanti told the IDG News Service that at least initially, Deshpande, MIT Chairman Alex d'Arbeloff, and he will review and select the winning proposals in a process that he said will cut through the government and corporate red tape researchers typically face.

The Deshpande Center will also provide what MIT called a "significant" amount of funding for a new program that will place MIT engineering undergraduates in internship positions in industry and government.

This effort, called the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, sounds promising, said entrepreneur Mahesh Ganmukhi, president and CEO of Cereva Networks Inc. The Marlboro, Massachusetts-based company plans to soon launch its first product in the storage-attached networks arena, and Ganmukhi deemed the center "a nice way to help other entrepreneurs."

"It's a really great idea -- Deshpande is a real visionary," he said.