Learning from MIT

9 min readNov 27, 2018

Returning to normality after a week in Boston isn’t easy. Apart from the snow, the weather isn’t so different, but the entrepreneurial drive feels worlds apart.

Being able to visit MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is certainly a privilege, and it was really important to me that we made the most of this opportunity and opened it up to as wide an audience as possible.

Welsh Government has a unique relationship with MIT — as a member of the Industrial Liaison Programme (ILP) there are invitations to a series of events and conferences aimed at helping industry liaise with the research and unique output of MIT.

Normally, this programme is restricted to industrial partners — blue-chip organisations like Mitsubishi, Rio Tinto, BT, Apple and 3M. The Welsh Ministers have a membership which allows them to extend an invitation to SMEs and start-ups across the ecosystem.

The ILP runs themed events throughout the year and around the world to facilitate this connectivity across the membership and researchers of MIT.

Back in July we approached Welsh Government with an idea to create a trip that brought the costs down to a minimum, and anchor additional workshops and sessions around the conference to really drive the value for attendees. By crashing in AirBnbs, we could hang out at the end of the day and really process what we had learned from the presentations and meetings.

Along with 13 other entrepreneurs, we made the trip to Boston earlier in November to make the most of this partnership and see just how much of an impact connecting with MIT could have on Welsh entrepreneurs.

There were five big lessons that I learned, and thought I’d share.

The last 18 months of my life I’ve spent a lot of time delving into the works of Professor Carol Dweck. The growth mindset concept sounds like the work of any one of the thousands of life coaches on Instagram, but Professor Dweck’s PhD is from Yale, and she is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

If you have a growth mindset you believe that you can continue to learn and grow regardless of how hard it might be, if you have a fixed mindset you have a belief that you have the “talent” you were born with and that’s that.

At MIT, growth mindset is evident. People aren’t entitled to succeed, or to receive a chance, but work hard to make opportunities and focus on developing the skills needed to succeed.

Bill Aulet* (Managing Director of the Martin Trust Entrepreneurship Center at MIT) teaches entrepreneurs a process that gives future entrepreneurs the skills needed to assess their ideas, the wider opportunity, and work to prove themselves wrong rather than right.

We meet way too many people with ideas whose first question is “What do you think? Is it a good idea?”. This belief that someone else holds the key to validating your idea is flawed, and takes away any power to act independently.

We overly fantasise about the idea that there is a flash of inspiration and your big idea comes to you in a moment. This is not true in the case of the hundreds of successful entrepreneurs I’ve ever met.

True success comes from sacrifice and graft. Not moments of genius.

The development of these skills might lead to someone setting up a business and succeeding as an entrepreneur, but they will be just as useful to future employers and whatever career path they choose. Either way, they gain a little more independence and an ability to assess viability of their ideas and hunches.

*Some members of our group were beyond excited to meet Bill Aulet. If they’d had an option to have dinner with Bill and his wife or Beyonce and her husband, Jay-Z would have been ordering takeaway. He held no punches and squeezed so much value into our meeting that it certainly didn’t disappoint. If you haven’t already — check out his book “Disciplined Entrepreneurship”.

This week, there was a big story about ionic wind-powered aircraft created by MIT researchers. The announcement was reported as being the realisation of a vision first inspired by Star Trek.

There’s something compelling about technology that mimics or replicates visions first established in TV series’ and films. We already know the use cases and we are excited when we see the science fiction come true.

So many of the innovations shared really only hit home when the presenters showed the concept in action in real life. The broader opportunities of 5G weren’t exciting until the connected bicycle warned the self-driving car that it was coming around the corner to avoid an accident. When we were being told about innovations in pico-scale Transmission Electron Microscopy it meant nothing to my simple mind until the new renewable energy storage system was demonstrated.

For a lot of the ideas, they were seeking use cases that could take the technology to the mainstream. These use cases weren’t always so predictable, such as when Dr Eric D. Evans demonstrated an airborne LADAR system initially created to spot camps in overgrown forests and jungles which ended up being utilised by FEMA to assist with recovery efforts post-natural disaster.

Dr Eric D. Evans demonstrating ALIRT (Airborne Ladar Imaging Research Testbed)

The other side of this is how products develop to take advantage of the known framework and phraseology that we as users are comfortable with. Folders and files on computers make no sense apart from the fact that office workers were used to that approach. It created a bridge between the known and the unknown that supported adoption.

For new concepts that lack traction, it’s useful to lean on this familiarity in your marketing and messaging rather than expending energy on an educational effort. Being able to tell your story is as important as knowing your story.

The purpose of the conference was to share MIT researchers’ work with industrial partners to create joint commercial opportunities.

This opportunity to see behind the curtain allows a range of people from different backgrounds to understand the thinking going on inside this institution.

Some of the smartest folks in the world stand up on stage and tell of their need for help and ideas to take these breakthroughs to the mainstream.

Some of the best known and most successful companies do the same.

The biggest challenges need the views of a diverse group of stakeholders. The next breakthrough could come from the leftfield.

Back home, I haven’t witnessed a proactive attempt to connect the work of researchers at Welsh universities with the start-up and SME communities.

I’ve been involved with programmes that could have facilitated it, but we never were able to get the comms team to work as an integral part of these projects — picking up from Storytellers Rule.

If there is one lesson that Welsh academia could implement tomorrow it is this — open and create connectivity. Without this, entrepreneurs are weaker, and the impact of research is significantly hindered.

The newly announced Clwstwr Creadigol could be the first step in proving this concept. As a member of its Management Board, I hope that is the case.

Another big lesson from Bill Aulet was the need to see the team evolve as much as an idea. In the environment of MIT where you are surrounded daily by potential cofounders of the finest order, things are a little different, but there are lessons to learn.

A real challenge that we’ve seen in our experience back home is the number of startups that are launched with a sole founder. It is hard enough launching a business, even harder when you’re carrying all of the responsibility alone.

Trying to work out how we fix that isn’t so straightforward. People have to find business partners and build relationships which are stronger than some marriages, with full candour at all times. You don’t get that from networking events or cofounder speed-dating, it takes time to know whether you have or can build the necessary trust.

The other side of this issue is what to do when founders fall out. There have been a number of examples of this that have led to disastrous outcomes when the right shareholders agreements or expectations have not been in place.

One example Bill gave was of a company that had a terrible pitch day which turned out to be the saving grace for the team. After the disappointment of losing out on the investment, the team broke up, with only two founders remaining. These surviving founders then went on to raise significant investment and launch a successful business.

The stress of the process and not coming up to the required level was the perfect test of commitment for the team, and once the stragglers abandoned the cause they had the dedication to succeed.

How we create this environment isn’t so obvious. It makes sense to look at whether there are enough opportunities when undergrads and postgrads are still at university to cross-pollinate with diverse departments and skillsets, but this requires entrepreneurship to become a cross-cutting theme.

Doing this for people when they are aged 30–50 and thinking of starting a business alone is trickier; we collectively must do more to make it more realistic and straightforward.

The session that sparked the interest for us in setting up this trip was delivered at the DevOpsGroup offices back in June. Michael Schrage talked at length about a range of emerging trends, but focused mostly on two things: users and data.

The most successful companies of the last two decades have put their users at the core of their service — Google PageRank beat out the competition because it used user feedback to improve its product. Amazon rose to the top as it learned from its users and used their opinions to sell more products.

This virtuous cycle gets better as more users use it.

Without feedback loops we are missing out on the finest form of research and development.

Rather than me give you a weak explanation, just hit the link above and give it a listen.

Being back in Wales I’ve met more people who have no idea what MIT is than people who are excited about it. If we don’t even know what is possible, we can never imagine it for ourselves.

With all of the negativity created by the uncertainty of Brexit, and the many millions of economic drivers who are opposed to the unnecessary disruption, it is hard to see the positivity.

Being at MIT showed the scale of the potential. In Wales, the media overly focuses on the downsides of automation, and other upcoming technological revolutions. We face these changes every generation, but for some reason the narrative is more often about loss rather than gain.

We need to create an internet of opportunities — a visible chart of why there is so much to be optimistic for in the future. Stories to tell people why to develop new skills or experience new industries, and create connectivity through Be The Spark to offer an alternative form of support to new workers and entrepreneurs.

There are a number of us in Wales who have a responsibility to do more to raise the sense of optimism and awareness of opportunity. The world is changing, and with the right mindset and environment, we can embrace that change. That hasn’t always felt like the case.

Georgina Campbell Flatter, Senior Executive at the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, highlighted to us that “ideas are ZIP code agnostic, opportunity is not”. Companies in the MIT ecosystem valued R&D and invested accordingly.

For Wales to thrive, we need to create sustainable opportunity, without lowering the barrier to the point where it becomes unchallenging and removes the development of grit.

And the philosophy that shone through from entrepreneurs at the conference? This quote from Domingo Godoy of Frogmi summed it up nicely