For decades MIT graduates have been funding hundreds of new companies each year. These sum up to 30,000 active companies founded by MIT alumni as of 2014, making $2 trillion in annual revenues (slightly more than Italy’s GDP). While these numbers clearly show that MIT is the core R&D center of the world, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The effects of a MIT entrepreneurial and technological afflatus are much more widespread and this is my story.
Back then I was a fresh Ph.D. and all my stuff was being a medieval archaeologist, Indiana Jones style.
A couple of years ago, I had a quick and passionate love affair with MIT. How I ended up there was uncommon, but the consequences of this love affair were even more unpredictable.
Back then I was a fresh Ph.D. and all my stuff was being a medieval archaeologist, Indiana Jones style. During my Ph.D. at the University of Granada, I directed an archaeological research project in Sicily for 5 years. Together with my team, I surveyed more than 180 square km. Some days we just walked for hours in the mud, others we got burned by the Sicilian sun. Eventually, we discovered 69 archaeological settlements, spanning from prehistory to the 15th century. I wrote a good and thick (867 pages) thesis, got a couple of interesting findings and some good publications. In the pursuit of a career as a researcher and professor, I applied for a post-doc at the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at MIT.
One sunny Sicilian day a letter with MIT logo struck me like a thunder: I got the position. A few months later I packed my stuff and landed at the Logan airport. As soon as I stepped into MIT I felt like I was being hit by an unstructured stream of new ideas that started resonating with mine.
Now, I was an archaeologist at MIT the only one at the whole institute as far as I was aware. I was as strange as a two dollar bill and I had a six-month contract. I could use that little time for: a) locking myself into a library and carrying on the research project I got paid for, or b) trying to get the most out of that opportunity, eventually screwing up my career as an archaeologist.
No doubt. I took the red pill, stayed in Wonderland, and tried to figure out how deep the rabbit hole went. I started showing up at all kind of classes and courses: Technology, Entrepreneurship, Big Data, Social Physics, Smart Cities, Electric Grids, Media and Fabrication Ventures. I was more excited than a sophomore when I sat in talks from Noam Chomsky, Paul Graham, Joi Ito and Shigeru Ban. I joined MIT Underwater Hockey team and made dozens of great friends.
I was in love with MIT but I knew that, like a summer love, it couldn’t last forever. I wanted to be part of that world and I wanted to find my niche. I am not a tech guy, but a humanist. Thanks to MIT I learned that I could apply my methodology to also to present-day society problems that could be solved with a proper technology.
When I came back to the Old World I put in my baggage what I learned at MIT, a ‘900 plate depicting the Great Dome and a couple of business ideas that I had while in Boston. At the first occasion, I teamed up with a bunch of friends and started a company basing on one of my ideas. We built a search engine, named Ludwig, to help everyone to be a better and more confident English writer. Two months ago I left my job as a researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany and started working full time on Ludwig.
I used to be an archaeologist and thanks to MIT I became a digital humanist and an entrepreneur. What unimaginable consequences derived from a six-month post-doc? MIT did not only impact my life, but also my teammates’, their relatives and the 200k users that come on Ludwig every month to find help with their English writing.
If a butterfly flapping its wings at MIT has caused the birth of a startup in Sicily, then how influential is MIT and, more broadly how a little campus along the Charles River has directly or indirectly brought innovation to the world?
