MIT Media Lab Visionaries To VARs: Think Out of The Box

Visionaries at the MIT Media Lab 25th Anniversary celebration Friday offered some practical advice for technology solution providers: think out of the box, take big risks and tap the creative instincts of your own customers.

At an event at MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Media Lab, which has sparked countless technology breakthroughs, Eran Egozy said the key to success for any solution provider is thinking out of the box. Egozy, an MIT graduate, is the cofounder and CTO of Harmonix Music Systems, the creators of the popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games.

"The most dangerous thing is getting boxed in," he said. "Where you think that the only space you have to play with is this big and you are just trying to innovate in very small ways.

"The way to really create new magical things to happen is to step outside of the box and think of new ways that your tools and technologies might be used that no one else has ever thought of before," he advised solution providers. "A lot of those may fail initially but that is okay. Failure is part of the package. After you do that for a while you will get sort of that magical moment."

Egozy was one of hundreds of distinguished professors, alumni and business leaders, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who came to the Media Lab to celebrate the innovation and technology breakthroughs that had their beginnings at the Media Lab. Schmidt was scheduled to speak later in the day.

NEXT: "Thinking Way, Way Out Of The Box"

MIT Professor Hugh Herr, who lost his legs in a climbing accident when he was a teenager and whose research has propelled a new era of bionic prosthesis breakthroughs at the Media Lab, said it is critical that businesses set up a team within the company "thinking way, way far out, thinking way, way out of the box.

"Companies get large, and they have a lot of inertia," said Herr, who heads the Media Lab's Biomechatronics Group. "And they start just doing simple nuances to their technology, just very incremental steps. And all of a sudden there is a well-funded elite small startup company that just races past them. Stay nimble and stay small."

At the heart of the MIT Media Lab's success, said Herr, is a highly funded group of the "best and brightest" creative people in the world. "At the Media Lab, we are always asking: why are we relevant? What are we doing? What is the future?" he said. "We’re always pulling our hair out as if we just began, and I think that is very healthy."

Dr. Mitchell Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, said one of the keys for businesses to be successful in the future is tapping into their customers’ creative instincts. He said solution providers need to tap into "the power of letting everyone be a creator. Developing products that let people do that. But also relying on your customers. Getting ideas from your customers. Let your customers be the inventors and the innovators, and learn from them."

Resnick's MIT group has developed Scratch, a building block programming language and community where children program and share interactive stories, games and animations.

NEXT: Take Risks And Fail

Resnick said the secret to the next wave of innovation at the Media Lab is developing tools that "let everyone become a creator."

"We don’t just want MIT researchers to be creating things," he said. "We want to let everybody become a designer and creator so they can really determine their own futures."

Frank Moss, the current director of the MIT Media Lab, said the lesson that entrepreneurs and business leaders should take from the Media Lab is that "it's all about experimentation and taking risk."

"In the Media Lab, we set people free to take risks and fail," he said."From failing, you learn. From learning, you discover." That leads to new ways of doing businesses and opens up new markets, he said.

His advice for business leaders is to set their executives free to learn and fail. "That is the lesson from the Media Lab," he said. "Not just for entrepreneurs, but for anyone trying to accomplish anything in the 21st century."

NEXT: Empowerment Through Technology

Moss said his vision of the future is a new era of technology that "will empower everyone not just to search, shop and socialize on the Internet, but to take control of their lives, to literally take control of their own health, wealth and happiness in a way that we haven't to date."

Moss sees people in the future using technology to improve their health. He sees people in the future taking control of their "quantified cells" so they can "access the data, understand it, and apply it to change their behavior and prevent disease."