The head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s trailblazing Media Laboratory yesterday said he encourages its faculty and students to “try something that works in practice, but not in theory.”
“The whole point … is learning through construction, rather than instruction,” Joichi Ito told nearly 200 people at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “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.”
The Media Lab’s 26 faculty and approximately 150 students are working on about 350 projects involving everything from molecular biology to the future of opera to self-driving cars, he said.
“I don’t read business plans,” Ito said. “I’m much more interested” in what students are doing.
One key to success is agility, he said, citing as an example Facebook’s propensity for releasing new features every few weeks.
“Release early and release often,” 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 there.
“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.”
The Boston-Cambridge area has “a lot more” expertise in technology and innovation than the West Coast, Ito said, but it needs to create a “critical mass” of angel investors and venture capitalists to continue to excel.
“If you bet on the right people, and you bet enough,” he said, “you’ll get a hit.”