MIT and Boston University are joining forces to provide law clinics for student entrepreneurs looking for legal advice, reports Katherine Nazemi for The Tech. “There’s opportunity for students to drop in and say ‘I don’t know if I need help or not, but this is what I’m doing, what do you think?’” explains Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart.
According to a new MIT study, airlines could handle flight delays more equitably by distributing them among themselves, reports Lloyd Mallison for Boston.com. The new system “would mean that two hypothetical planes could both have a 15-minute delay rather than one having no delay, and one having a 30-minute wait,” Mallison explains.
A new study by MIT researchers shows how airlines could juggle delays more equitably by distributing disruptions among themselves, reports Bart Jansen for USA Today. The researchers found that airlines could distribute delays “without adding significantly to the overall delays.”
Senior lecturer Hal Gregersen writes for Fortune that networking can be useful for not only career advancement, but also for sparking big business ideas. “It’s about talking to people with dissimilar backgrounds or perspectives to spark new thinking or solve a problem,” Gregersen explains.
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Chad Autry and Beth Davis-Sramek highlight an MIT study examining corporate sustainability efforts. Autry and Davis-Sramek write that, “In a global survey of 2,500 executives, 90% of the respondents indicate that businesses need to collaborate to address sustainability challenges.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Akst writes about a study by researchers at MIT and Northwestern that identified consumers who purchased new products likely to fail. If consumers with high “flop affinity” scores bought a product “that was a good sign that the item would be a bust.”
Kelsey D. Atherton writes for Popular Science about Explorer, a camera ball designed by MIT alumnus Francisco Aguilar that can be used by first responders to survey an area. “Rescue workers could drop Explorers into nooks and crannies that are otherwise inaccessible for larger tools."
Hal Gregersen, a senior lecturer at MIT and executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, writes for Fortune about the importance of asking questions. “Questioning is not a means to an end, but the creative intersection where a whole new solution – an innovative moment of truth – can catch fire,” Gregersen writes.
Financial Times reporter Rebecca Knight discusses MIT Sloan’s Master of Finance program and how to be a successful asset manager with Senior Lecturer Gita Rao. “It takes an incredible focus,” says Rao. “You have to be very decisive [and] you have to be an independent thinker.”
Senior lecturer Trond Undheim writes for WBUR’s Cognoscenti about how parenting has prepared him for being an entrepreneur. “As a parent, I often find myself laying down rules and setting expectations, only to end up questioning many of my previously held assumptions. I go through the same process as an entrepreneur,” Undheim explains.
In an article for The New York Times about the increasing demands placed on workers, Tony Schwartz writes about Prof. Zeynep Ton’s research, which indicated that allowing employees to slack can make them more effective. “Employees operating with some slack, Ms. Ton explained, add value that those pushed to the limit cannot,” Schwartz writes.
Team Raptor Maps received the top prize in MIT’s annual $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, reports Nidhi Subbaraman for BetaBoston. Founded by three MIT students, Raptor Maps “proposes to use camera-carrying drones to survey farmland and pinpoint damage before pests and diseases can decimate crops.”
OptiBit, a startup that aims to make data centers more energy efficient, won this year’s MIT Clean Energy Prize, reports Vijee Venkatraman for BetaBoston. The OptiBit team explains that their technology offers “10 times more throughput, two times lower latency, and 95 percent less energy use” compared to copper-based chips.
Chana Schoenberger of The Wall Street Journal speaks with Visiting Professor Lily Fang about her research that indicates that male analysts have an easier time getting ahead on Wall Street than female analysts. “It wasn’t that men do better or women do better, but rather that the influence of connections on their outcomes is different,” says Fang.
Richard Waters writes for The Los Angeles Times about Professor Michael Cusumano’s new book “Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons From Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. “The authors attribute the outsized success of the three pioneers of the personal computing age, as well as their sometimes damaging inflexibility, to the driving passions that shaped them.”