Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurship Center is located equidistant from the university’s business school, its media and architecture school and engineering wing, in an area managing director Bill Aulet calls the “demilitarised zone.”

“The geeks can come over and the suits can come over and they can all work together to build a company,” says Mr Aulet.

Inside, it has everything a young entrepreneur might need to start a business: soundproof phone booths for private calls with investors.

Cozy cubicles with whiteboard walls for meetings with business partners.

And boxes of boxes of Ramen noodles for strivers who can’t spare the cash or the time for a proper meal.

In one room, MBA student Birju Shah is hunched over a laptop.

He is the founder of MDBug, a medical transcription and electronic medical records company, and Sugar Crew, a social networking site for people with diabetes.

Next door, three 20-something men in jeans and T-shirts write formulas on the wall.

They run Ubiquitous Energy, a company that has developed a way to make light, flexible solar cells that can conform to almost any material.

Embracing innovation

Outside the building, an entrepreneurial “walk of fame” salutes giants like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, William Hewlett and David Packard, as well as MIT alumni Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Software, and Robert Swanson, founder of Genentech…

Read the whole article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15342337

The world has lost a creative genius.

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

(NECN: Peter Howe, Cambridge/Wellesley, MaA) – “This man, Steve Jobs, was — like him or not personally — the greatest entrepreneur of our generation.”

As encomia poured in to the legendary Apple CEO, that was the verdict offered by William Aulet, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. It’s an organization that barely a month ago commissioned what is sure to be one of the finest tributes to Jobs: Placing him in an “entrepreneur walk of fame” in Kendall Square alongside giants like Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and the Hewlett and the Packard of Hewlett-Packard.

Where some men are legends for revolutionizing one industry, Aulet noted, Jobs revolutionized not just computers but cellphones, music, and animated movies (through Pixar), overcoming some flops along the way and his firing from the very company he co-founded.

“Failure can break a lot of people. It never broke Steve Jobs. In fact it just made him stronger in the end,” Aulet said, adding that the research he did into Jobs’s life as they prepared the walk of fame made him realize a lot of people who love iPads and iPhones and iPods and Macs might very well not have liked Jobs the person very much. “He was profane, he was brash, he was a perfectionist — I mean, he was an artist, and when you look at an artist, you have to judge them by their art.”

Jobs often took an artistic sensibility to being a corporate leader. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition,” Jobs told Stanford University graduates at their 2005 commencement in a speech that has become a YouTube sensation. “They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Business leadership coach Suzanne Bates, CEO of Bates Communications in Wellesley, Mass., is an author of four leadership books and profiled Jobs in her just-released “Discover Your CEO Brand.” She credits Jobs with even reinventing the idea of what it means to be a CEO.

“Steve Jobs embodied the Apple brand. When he walked across the stage, he commanded the room, and today every CEO really wants to emulate that style,” Bates said. “He really demanded perfection, but that is what made Apple the great brand it is today.”

Among big multinational corporations, there may be none where, for good and for bad, the reputation and identity of the company have been so bound up in the reputation and identity of the CEO as with Apple and Jobs. That means it is not going to be easy for his successor CEO, Tim Cook, who seemed to only underscore how unlike Jobs he is when he took the stage Tuesday to introduce the iPhone 4s — some wonder whether the designation means “for Steve” — to lead a 100-minute-long walk-and-talk presentation of Apple technology, the kind that will always be associated with Jobs in his dungarees, black turtleneck, and New Balance running shoes.

Bates said that Cook “will lead in his own way. He needs to find his style. he needs to find a way to connect” — which may include finding some non-Jobs-like way of making public presentations, or at least one that doesn’t call so much attention to Jobs’s absence.

Given the huge momentum Apple has built under Jobs in iPhones, iPods, and iPads, and a market valuation of nearly $350 billion, Bates said, “I don’t think you have to be Steve Jobs to be a great leader of Apple.”

Aulet said Cook unquestionably has his work cut out for him.

“It’s very, very difficult, and Tim Cook has got to be his own person and be his own style. He can’t be Steve Jobs. There was only one Steve Jobs. That doesn’t mean Tim Cook can’t be successful — but to come in the path of the greatest entrepreneur of his generation, our generation, maybe ever, it’s a very, very difficult task.”

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