Tough Tech Today with Meyen and Miller
What happens to the ideas generated across the United States federal government’s research initiatives? Will Dickson and Trinity Torres walk us through the pathways of taxpayer-funded technological advancements and opportunities for a diverse pool of private citizens-entrepreneurs to find commercial success licensing patents owned by the U.S. government.
Dual-use ventures – tough tech startups pursuing commercial relationships with the private sector and federal government, are a unique class of companies with whom Kathryn “Katy” Person, of the MIT Innovation Initiative, works daily.
No longer the domain of strictly nation-states, ‘new space’ is undergoing a wave of commercialization and growth. Two key engineering challenges, observed Louis Perna, are in-space communications and propulsion. He and his co-founder, Natalya Bailey, launched Accion Systems to provide cost-effective electrospray propulsion for satellites.
The building blocks of life, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), can be used for computational advantage, posits Dr. James Banal, postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Biological Engineering, in the Bathe Lab.
What is ‘tough tech’? To quote from Who’s Your Ally?, a piece @jmill published by the MIT Innovation Initiative:
Whether spinning out of a pristine laboratory or an unkempt dormitory, tough tech ventures and the entrepreneurs building them may be loosely defined by their work in an emerging area where science meets engineering, and may sometimes be referred to as working in “deep tech” or “frontier tech”. The markets which such companies could serve may not yet exist, and the companies’ development milestones may be measured in years rather than months.
https://innovation.mit.edu/blog-post/whos-your-ally_0/