MIT launches new global innovation initiative

MIT today announced a new initiative that will strengthen, connect and accelerate its innovation efforts around the globe. The International Innovation Initiative (I³, pronounced "I-cubed"), which MIT President Susan Hockfield announced today at a conference in New Delhi, India, will provide a focal point for future interactions between MIT researchers and the global venture capital community.

"I³ will usher in a new era of partnership and collaboration, and provide new opportunities for innovation," said Hockfield. "The initiative will be a catalyst for new strategies to solve world problems -- such as climate change, energy and the environment -- and to drive economic growth."

I³ will use as its model the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, established at the MIT School of Engineering in 2002 to identify and incubate novel early-stage research developed at MIT, with the aim of turning great ideas into real-world products and processes. Founded with an initial donation by technology entrepreneur and visionary Desh Deshpande and his wife, Jaishree, the center has funded more than 65 projects; 12 of those have spun out of the center into commercial ventures with outside financing.

"The newly formed International Innovation Initiative provides a streamlined organizational umbrella to strengthen and enhance the innovation ecosystem by applying the best practices of the Deshpande Center in the School of Engineering to our international activities and collaborations," said Subra Suresh, dean of engineering and Ford Professor of Engineering.

Among its many objectives, I³ will work with international partners to identify and select collaborative research projects across multiple disciplines that could lead to new company formation; connect researchers to local and global venture capital networks; and develop courses for students that address technological innovation and go-to-market strategies.

I³ will be organized through the Deshpande Center within the MIT School of Engineering, and will be headed by Professor Charles L. Cooney, faculty director of the Deshpande Center.

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MIT and India to create health science and technology institute

MIT and the government of India's Department of Biotechnology today launched a partnership that will result in the creation of a new Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) in India.

This new institute, which will be modeled after the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), will include faculty from multiple disciplines and professions, offer degrees through multidisciplinary programs and develop strong ties with other institutions. Funded by the Indian government, the Indian HST will be a multidisciplinary, multiprofessional research and training center that is highly interconnected with regional centers of excellence.

The institute will increase India's capacity for translating scientific and technological advancements into medical innovations that have the potential to improve healthcare both in India and around the world.

HST Director Martha Gray and Dr. M. K. Bhan, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India, signed a letter of intent for this partnership today at a symposium in New Delhi titled "India and MIT: A Conversation about the Future."

"Tremendous potential exists in India, with its excellence in engineering and science. This partnership is an opportunity to create a long term, synergistic relationship that will result in wide ranging benefits to global health," said Bhan.

"Launching this new partnership with India's Department of Biotechnology will build on HST's pioneering model of medical education that integrates science, medicine and engineering to solve problems of human health," said Susan Hockfield, president of MIT. "We look forward to a future of significant collaboration across disciplines, across institutions and around the world."

To foster a culture of innovation in THSTI, HST will help recruit and train new THSTI faculty members. Each year starting in September 2008 and continuing until 2011, four recruited THSTI faculty fellows will join the HST faculty. These faculty fellows will train at HST for two years. During their stay they will develop translational research programs, design courses and curricula for THSTI, and develop close relationships with HST faculty and students.

These fellows will benefit from HST's nearly 40 years of experience bringing together science, engineering and medicine in education and translational medical research. HST's success stories include medical innovations such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, a low-cost AIDS detection kit and novel implantable drug delivery mechanisms.

HST and MIT will also benefit from having these fellows on campus. "We will have people immersed in our program who actually know about the unmet medical needs in India and who will expose our students and faculty to those needs," said Gray.

This exposure will help drive innovations that can make a real difference in global public health, said Gray. "I don't believe we can have a global impact on health if we don't have international partners as part of our community."

MIT and India have embarked on partnerships before. The two joined forces nearly 50 years ago to form the India Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, one of India's top-ranked engineering and science schools. "THSTI has the potential to be a second success story that could revolutionize medicine in India the same way the IIT schools revolutionized engineering and science," said Shiladitya Sengupta, assistant professor of medicine and an HST faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

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Digital Book

Can Amazon Kindle Digital Book Fever

Amazon (AMZN) Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos considers the book a stubborn relic of the predigital universe. While other media, including music, are readily available over digital delivery devices such as Apple's (AAPL) iPod, the book has stuck with its hardbound and softbound covers and dog-eared pages for hundreds of years. "Why are books the last bastion of analog?" Bezos asked during a Nov. 19 press conference. "Can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book and, if so, how?"

Bezos thinks he has the answer: Kindle, a handheld book reader he's hoping will help usher books into the digital age. On Nov. 19, Bezos unveiled the long-awaited device at the W Union Square hotel in New York. Kindle, available on Amazon for $399, holds about 200 books in a paperback-sized package and displays pages on a screen that appears more akin to paper than a backlit LCD screen.

Part portable library, part bookstore, Kindle is wirelessly hooked up to the Internet via Sprint Nextel's (S) high-speed cellular network, letting users download books at a moment's notice. Users can purchase books-some 90,000 titles are currently available-for about $10 apiece, and there are no connection-subscription fees.

Opening the Market
Amazon spent some three years on Kindle's design in hopes of creating a product so user-friendly that it will not only compete with printed books but also encourage users to choose it over reading the newspaper on handheld Web-connected devices such as smartphones. Kindle easily connects to the online dictionary Wikipedia and has a browser that lets users visit other Web sites. However, it only delivers those sites in black-and-white, and Web surfing is not intended to be its main function. "It's a single-purpose reading device," says Steve Kessel, Amazon's senior vice-president of worldwide digital media.

More broadly, Amazon hopes to widen the still nascent market for digital books (BusinessWeek, 9/3/07). Only the Sony (SNE) Reader has really gained much traction; it currently sells for between $300 and $400, according to prices listed for online retailers.

Kindle's creators took pains to make a smooth transition from analog to digital. The device lets users upload digital books and documents by e-mailing document attachments to a personal account associated with the device. It also stores books on Amazon's servers for easy reload in the event they're lost, corrupted, or the device gets stolen. Amazon didn't reveal any sales targets for the Kindle.

Subscription Base

Subscriptions to major publications, such as The New York Times (NYT) and Time Warner's (TWX) Time magazine, are available for between $5.99 and $15 a month. Amazon says it pays booksellers and periodical publishers a list price and then makes a profit from the difference between that and the download price. It does not share revenue from the sale of Kindle with the publishers.

Kindle also delivers blogs for between 99¢ and $1.99 per blog, per month, depending on how frequently the blog is updated. Blog publishers can sign up their services on Amazon's site and share in the subscription revenue. The charge, which may seem curious for usually free, ad-supported blogs, covers the expense of delivering the blog as well as providing publishers with an alternative revenue stream, says Amazon's Kessel.

Protection and Praise
Amazon does not protect the books with any digital rights management (DRM) technology. However, Kindle books are formatted specifically for the device and publishers are welcome to append their own DRM technology to their titles, says Kessel. To prove that publishers are embracing the technology rather than worrying about the potential for users to somehow hack into it and steal digital book titles, Amazon included a video featuring praise from well-known authors such as Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison. "I like the fact that it travels," said Morrison. "It is faster, it's lighter, and I have more [books] at my disposal."

Whether the Kindle can finally ignite the digital book market remains to be seen. But the device is already receiving positive reviews (BusinessWeek.com, 11/19/07), even if some commentators consider it ugly and a little pricey. Looks shouldn't be a problem if, as Bezos hopes, the Kindle becomes a gateway into authors' imaginations. "The most important thing about Kindle is it does indeed disappear so you can enter the author's world," he says.

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