MIT Media Lab director outlines tech strategy

The Boston-Cambridge area has much more expertise in technology and innovation than the West Coast, but needs to create a “critical mass” of angel investors and venture capitalists to continue to excel, the director of the MIT Media Lab said today.

“If you bet on the right people, and you bet enough, you’ll get a hit,” said Joichi Ito, an early investor in Twitter, told nearly 200 people at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Ito said he encourages the Media Lab’s 26 faculty members and approximately 150 students to “try something that works in practice, but not in theory.”

“The whole point … is learning through construction, rather than instruction,” he said. “You don’t get a Nobel Prize by doing what you’re told.

“Questioning authority doesn’t mean you have to be disrespectful to authority,” Ito added, “it means thinking for yourself.”

Agility, he said, also is a key to success. Facebook, for example, releases new features every few weeks, Ito said.

“Release early and release often,” he said. “I don’t read business plans; I’m much more interested” in what students are doing.

At the Media Lab, students and teachers are working on about 350 projects involving everything from molecular biology to the future of opera to autonomous cars, Ito said.

A self-described college dropout and “non-academic,” he told the Herald he has been pleasantly surprised by the reception he has gotten at MIT since he was named director of the Media Lab nearly a year ago.

“I didn’t expect it to be as friendly,” he said.

Ito said he wants to tackle some “grand challenges” during his time at the lab.

“Impact is something I’m very focused on — impact, uniqueness and magic,” he said. “I’d love to look back and see that we’ve changed the world in some good way.”

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