Aiming to streamline funding for leading-edge technology research and make the resulting innovations more available to small, entrepreneurial companies, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thursday launched the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.
Named for Sycamore Networks Chairman and Co-Founder Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande 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, nanotechnologies and bioengineering.
"Traditional funding mechanisms have become increasingly bureaucratized and risk-averse," said MIT President Charles Vest at the center's launch event in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday morning.
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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. region, 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. Its steering committee will include venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who have insight about the potential for commercialization of research as well as ties to the startup community. And if small companies have a place to interact with MIT faculty and follow the research being done there, as projects reach fruition there will be someone ready and interested in licensing the new technologies thus developed, he said.
One venture capitalist contacted after the event said that the Deshpande Center should greatly facilitate the relationship between universities and commercial interests. There has been a lack of organizations bridging the two entities, according to 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 respondents to a call for proposals that will be issued this spring. At least initially, Magnanti said, he, Deshpande and MIT Chairman Alex d'Arbeloff will review and select the winning proposals, a process that he said cuts through the government and corporate red tape researchers typically contend with.
The Deshpande Center also will 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 to entrepreneur Mahesh Ganmukhi, president and CEO of Cereva Networks. The Marlborough, Mass., company plans to launch its first product in the storage-area network arena shortly, and its CEO deemed the center "a nice way to help other entrepreneurs. It's a really great idea - Deshpande is a real visionary."
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