MIT:
The mother of all inventive types

Martin Culpepper, Ph.D. Candidate,
Helps other Students Obtain Patents

21 Feb 1999
The Straits Times (Singapore), Page 20
By Sandra Davie

Patent Pursuit
If all the companies set up by MIT graduates and faculty staff were to form a nation, their combined revenue would make it the 24th largest economy in the world with a GDP of US$116 billion…

Like many American youngsters, Ronald Demon spent hours honing his basketball skills and his feet would ache after a hard day on the hard wood.

But unlike his peers, he did not go shopping for the latest Nike shoes. Instead he decided to make his own.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student started work on a prototype shoe. Over the next three years, with the help of his professors, he kept refining his model.

Last September, patent number 5,813,142 was issued to Mr Ronald Demon, now 21, for a shoe sole that adapts to the wearer's needs automatically by adjusting the cushion to suit the pace of the activity.

Now he is on the verge of cutting a deal with a major sports shoe company.

An unusual story of a student made good?

Not so, if you ask Ms Lita Nelsen, director of the Cambridge-based university's technology licensing office, which helps the teaching staff and students protect their inventions.

Every year, her office receives about 125 new patents based on research arising out of MIT's labs. About 12 of the patents are for inventions by students alone.

Yearly, it grants up to 80 licences and catalyses the start-up of more than a dozen companies.

As Ms Nelsen tells Sunday Review: "Every day we have students like Ronald Demon walking in here, dreaming of being the next Bill Gates. We try and help them realise that dream."

Must Have That Extra Something
But the licensing office is just one small part of the whole MIT set-up that turns students into the technopreneurs of tomorrow.

It all begins at the admission stage.

All students entering the Tech, as the 138-year-old university is called, are expected to have the same sense of curiosity, initiative and resourcefulness that Mr Demon has, says Professor Merton Flemings, Toyota Professor in Materials Processing, who is co-director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA), set up to transplant the MIT environment here.

"There is no let-up on excellence, right from the beginning," he says.

The university, which has a total enrolment of 10,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, receives more than 8,500 applications for the 1,000 undergraduate places in the five schools of architecture and planning, engineering, humanities and social sciences, management and science.

Says Ms Elizabeth Johnson, associate director of the admissions office: "We are faced every year with the problem of choosing between an A student with almost-perfect SAT scores and another seven A students with almost-perfect SAT scores.

"'This is where we look for that extra something. We look at a student's personality and accomplishments. In essence we look for students with passion and intensity, because essentially that's what you would need to do well in MIT."

Once a student crosses the admission hurdle, he is plunged into MIT's intense learning environment.

All students, even those planning to study film and media, or linguistics under the great intellect Noam Chomsky, are required to clear the broad-based core curriculum which includes physics, calculus, biology and chemistry.

Says Professor Flemings: "We have a core of very rigorous courses that we expect everybody to take, no matter what they do."

At the end of the first year, students can choose to major in any of the five areas of engineering, science, humanities and social sciences, architecture and planning and management.

Although subjects are taught very much in the lecture and tutorial style, problems, puzzles and quizzes are thrown at students to set them thinking about the concepts they learned.

For example, a lecture on the mechanical properties of materials would end with the lecturer asking students to come up with an essay explaining why the Boeing 777 plane is built the way it is. What is the best coating for a jet engine? Why two engines and not four? Why is the fuselage so big?

Not all the answers are found in books. Sometimes, students conduct experiments or go on field trips to solve the problem.

As Mr Demon points out: "It's a hands-on place. If there's a students are encouraged to go down to the basement, build the appropriate equipment, and develop a solution."

Solving Real-Life Problems
Undergraduates are not required to do research, but at the end of four years, 80 per cent of MIT undergraduates would have taken part in at least one research project.

The undergraduate research opportunities programme office matches students with ongoing research projects at MIT, most of which are funded by the government or industry. Students can ask to be graded on their research work or ask to be paid. But engineering student Karen Lister, 20, says many students would do research for free: "Tech's mascot is the beaver, it should be the owl. Come down to the labs or dorms at 1 or 2 am and half the lights are on."

Adds Singapore Armed Forces scholar Ang Chee Wee, 21, who is involved in designing software that will serve as an agent for auctions conducted over the Internet: "You see your classroom lessons being applied to solve real-life problems. You learn so much more this way and the whole relevance of what you are studying becomes apparent."

Agreeing, another Singaporean, Economic Development Board scholar Christopher Tan, 25, who is involved in a research project funded by Ford Motors, notes that the link to industry makes the research all that much more relevant.

Says Mr Tan, who is studying for his master's in mechanical engineering: "You are not working away on a vague concept shut off in an ivory tower. You get to work on the real stuff here."

For some students, their undergraduate research projects become their master's and even their doctorate research passions. And often at the end of their academic career, they would have an invention which forms the basis for a start-up company.

Mr Robert Massie entered MIT in 1989 to study electrical engineering. During his undergraduate years, with his professors' help, he designed and built the Phantom, a device that creates the sensation of touch for computer users.

It can be used to help doctors practise surgery on virtual patients. The sophisticated technology enables them to feel like they are cutting into flesh.

By the end of his final year, he had patented the technology with the help of the university. He scraped together his savings, borrowed US$6,000 from his siblings, secured some advance orders and launched SensAble Technologies.

Today the company, a stone's throw from MIT, counts among its customers General Electric, Disney and Toyota.

Mr Massie, 28, now chairman and chief technology officer, says: "I went to MIT because even in high school when I was reading books on how to build a robot arm, the names of MIT professors would keep popping up.

"It is a fertile environment for anybody interested in research, discovery and enterprise."

At The Feet Of Great Minds
For another budding MIT technopreneur, PhD student John Santini Jr, one of the defining influences was learning at the feet of great minds -like that of his professor, Robert Langer.

The 1,000-strong MIT faculty boasts 12 Nobel laureates, including Professor Samuel Ting, for discovering the J particle, Professor Susumu Tonegawa for his work on the immune system, and Professor Philip Sharp for gene-splicing and professors Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani for economics.

Says Mr Santini, whose joint invention with three others, including two MIT professors, was patented recently: "I came here to MIT on a short research attachment and I was hooked. I came back a year later to work on the project for my PhD.

"Now at 26 years, I am co-inventor of the microchip that can be implanted in a patient and pre-programmed to release drugs, and I made it to the Nature magazine and even The New York Times, and I am looking at starting my own company in a few months."

But he stresses that it is his professors, particularly Professors Robert Langer and Michael Cima who set him off in the right direction. "Someone like Prof Langer is such a powerful role model. He is able to get you really interested, hooked on learning and discovery."

The 49-year-old Prof Langer, a chemical and biomedical engineering lecturer, is a walking embodiment of entrepreneurial and research success.

Ms Nelsen from the licensing office says the professor generates so many patents that it would take the staff of an average-sized university patent office to handle his work alone.

To date, Prof Langer has about 320 patents under his belt. His latest is the one he worked on with Mr Santini. Featured in The New York Times this month, the dime-sized silicon microchip, implanted under the skin of a patient, will release a combination of drugs on a pre-programmed schedule or by remote control.

For minority and under-privileged students, there is the Urban Design Corps, a volunteer group of lecturers and postgraduate students headed by MIT mechanical engineering professor Alex Slocum. Any student with even the vaguest idea of an invention can take it to them and they would help turn that idea into reality.

Know-How To Start Companies
One volunteer, PhD student Martin Culpepper, says that in the last two years alone, the team had helped 40 students develop and even patent their ideas. They are then given the help and taught the know-how to start up their own companies.

Current ideas being developed include a massage soap, a water-jet cutter and the tetra sponge -a triangular shaped dish-washing sponge with varied surfaces.

Says Mr. Culpepper: "Students come to us with brilliant ideas. We them to develop the idea, right down to the nuts and bolts of building the product."

When a product is developed, refined and proven to work, the student can then look into patenting his invention. This is where the licensing office steps in.

Any student or staffer who is unable to fork out the US$10,000 (S$17,000) for the patenting process heads for the MIT's technology licensing office.

The staff will assess the qualities and commercial viability of the product and apply for a patent. When the patent comes through, the office will then look into licensing it to companies or even license it back to the staff or student if they want to start up a company based on their invention.

The office also matches aspiring entrepreneurs with venture capitalists or "angels" as they are called.

Says Ms Nelsen: "Because of MIT's record, quite often they come to us, nosing around for good ideas to invest in."

Says Mr Santini: "In any other university I would end up teaching or going out to work as an engineer. But at MIT you can dream of being a technopreneur and the whole system is geared up to help you realise that."

It is no wonder then that a 1997 study by BankBoston found that if the companies established by MIT graduates and faculty members formed an independent nation, their combined revenue would make it the 24th largest economy in the world with a GDP of US$116 billion. The 4,000 companies that have emerged from MIT provide employment for a million people worldwide and have a total turnover of US$232 billion.

It is natural that MIT is a "cradle of entrepreneurs", says Mr Edmund Dunn, executive director of the MIT Enterprise Forum, an alumni group of corporate executives, professors and industry leaders.

"Generations of technologies have been conceived at MIT, and have gone out into the world to multiply.

"It's not just Raytheon and Digital. Apollo Computer, Bose, Thinking Machines, Lotus, Analog, Thermo Electron, Biogen and Repligen are all linked to MIT. About 150 new companies are added to the list every year.

"It's like a transmitter, transmitting technology, ideas, businesses and jobs."

Culpepper Ancestry. (#48976) Son of Martin L. and Terrry A. Culpepper. Also see bio at MIT.