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Home , Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab

INSTITUTEOF Photo byAndy Ryan MIT MediaLab buildinginCambridge, Mass.

Credit To stay at the cutting edge, MIT went outside a its comfort renegade in the lab By Lawrence M. Fisher

hen the Media Lab at MIT sought a new director last year, from a global list of candidates, it’s safe to say the recruitment committee did not go looking for a college dropout, a former “rave” organizer or a godson of the late . But they got all that and more in Joichi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist, social activist and world citizen whose résumé makes up in unusual pursuits what it lacks in formal academic credentials. A traditional search produced hundreds of qualified applicants, who were narrowed over a year to a short list, but without yielding a good fit. Nicholas Negraponte, the lab’s founder and its director for many years, had publicly clashed with the outgoing leader, Frank Moss, describing his tenure as “a five-year period like the Dark Ages.” He knew Ito socially and personally recruited him, tracking the peripatetic venture capitalist down to Santa Catalina Island, where he was indulging in his latest interest/ obsession, scuba diving. “I had never been to the lab,” says Ito, who is 46 but looks decades younger. Commuting to work on his single- speed bicycle, he could pass for a grad student. “I had things to do; I was running , investing, living in Dubai, diving every weekend. Nicholas called me in between dives. Oddly the technology didn’t work and we could barely hear each other. Later, I was diving in the Bahamas, and he called me again and said come up here as soon as you can.” He visited the lab on March 11, 2011, which was by coincidence when the earthquake and tsunami hit , so Ito was preoccupied by the need to find out if his family and friends were safe. Typically, he also immediately launched a startup to distribute Geiger counters and do radiation tests faster than the Japanese government would or could. But he spent two days in conversation with Media Lab staff and students and rapidly developed a mutual rapport. “It was the most interesting two days I’d had in a long time,” Ito says. “Then came the formal stuff, and them trying to get their heads around my not having an academic degree. My role is a little bit odd, because normally the director is also a professor, and I’m not a professor. For the most part, anything limiting is hidden Credit from me, and I felt fundamentally welcomed.”

Q2.2013 47 Joichi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Ito may not have the sort of grand vision Negraponte Ito sees it as part of his mission that more of the had for the lab when he created it, but he does have an lab’s programs are available to the public, not just paying ambitious — and potentially disruptive — agenda. He means sponsors. He also wants to make students and faculty more to “open” the lab, both literally, by inviting more outsiders in, available, using the social media tools that are second nature and metaphorically, in the Open Source sense of the word, to him, and to the generation currently attending MIT. Ito to make it less like Apple and more like Mozilla, creator divides time into BI and AI, as in Before the and of the open-source Web browser, Firefox. He is already After the Internet, and in his vision of AI, owning an asset shaking things up, bringing in a diverse group of director’s is now less important than sharing it, whether the asset is fellows, most of whom share his lack of a formal academic student and faculty talent or intellectual property. background, and striving to open the lab up to the kind “I’m shifting away from IP as a primary focus,” Ito says. of informal collaboration that typifies the world of Web “IP is a byproduct of a process. You can’t patent ideas, only startups. “To me, the Media Lab felt like a container. It was a processes. And we’re really good at ideas. We were doing little bit connected, but not real connected. I’m trying to turn the multi-touch screen a year before Apple. We do create it from a container into a platform: the Media Lab Network.” about 20 patents a year, and some of them are valuable, but a One of his first steps was to eliminate a senior faculty CEO is going to pivot their business a lot more rapidly after committee that his predecessor had established. New interacting with our students and faculty, and that’s so much projects now can go forward without passing through as more valuable. The real bang for your buck is that every two much bureaucracy, more akin to the spontaneity of Internet or three years, you’ll see something here that makes you startup launches than the deliberative way large corporations make a multibillion-dollar decision differently.” work. “We’ll see how it goes,” Ito says. “I’ve been able to Negraponte created the lab in 1985 to explore his make decisions rapidly that would have been political in the hypothesis that the broadcast and motion picture industry, past. People may argue with me, but they don’t get as upset the print and publishing industry, and the computer as they might have. Also, part of the position of director is industry would go beyond their already overlapping communicating, and I think the Media Lab has gotten more spheres of influence to a nearly complete merger. As attention since I came in. I think they wanted someone who wrote in “The Media Lab, Inventing the can connect to high-level contacts around the world, which Future at MIT” (Viking 1987), Negraponte’s vision was that Nicholas did a lot of, but other previous directors did not.” all communication were suffering a joint metamorphosis, which could only be understood properly if treated as a single subject, and only advanced properly as a single craft. He posited that the best way to figure out what needed to be done was through exploring the human sensory and cognitive system and the ways that humans naturally interact. In 1985, Apple’s Macintosh was just a year old, and Ethernet, the technology that allowed personal computers to link across a network, was also recently introduced. Yet Negraponte and former MIT President were able to raise the necessary millions to fund the lab, with much of it coming from corporate sponsors, plus the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation. Its early projects had a distinct consumer electronics focus, like its foray into HDTV standards, with the assumption that they would lead to new products for its sponsors. Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan, but spent much of his childhood in , where his parents worked for Energy Conversion Devices, which was known for innovations in optical disks, rewritable memory chips and thin-film solar panels. also worked for ECD in his teens and came to regard its chief inventor and founder, the late Stan Ovshinsky, as a second father, particularly after his own parents divorced. In 1987, Ito moved to Silicon Valley, where he met John Markoff, a technology reporter for . Markoff gave him a copy of MacPPP, the original Internet client software for the Macintosh. To Joi Ito, that simple program demonstrated how the Internet was about to transform from a scientist and engineer’s tool into a mass media platform. Back in Japan, he met the founders of

Global Citizen. Ito was born in Japan, grew up in Detroit and has worked around the world. 48 Q2.2013 Korn/Ferry Global Strategy, Local Players Joichi Ito’s World of Warcraft Guild

lthough Joi Ito has started a number acquire weapons, capabilities and I see this in Joi,” says John Seely Brown, a Aof companies and served as chief experiences. But to advance beyond a management writer and past head of the executive of the Creative Commons for basic level requires at first small teams, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or three years, he has relatively little to battle legions of automatons in PARC. “Once he knows what he really has operating experience, at least in this dungeons, and later, very large teams, to do, then he becomes incredibly world. But he has voluminous manage- called guilds, to battle other players creative in finding resources anywhere in ment experience from thousands of in raids. the organization. He never even thinks hours in the massively multiplayer online Long frustrated by the conventional about the fact that he’s just jumped over role-playing game World of Warcraft, hierarchies operating in even the most three silos. He has found out how to find where he heads a global group of several innovative technology companies, Ito who knows what, wherever they are, and hundred in one of the game’s oldest and says he sees in his Warcraft guild a new how to engage that person to help him. It largest guilds — an association of players. way to organize, manage and motivate completely slashes through the barriers It is a global team with local players and people. While he is not currently playing in hierarchies. World of Warcraft instills serves as a model for the way the world World of Warcraft, Ito remains in contact that spirit, finding the is evolving. with his guild members and hopes to people wherever World of Warcraft is play, but for Ito it resume when he has more time. He calls they are to is a very intense kind of play focusing on himself “guild custodian,” rather than master each strategy, tactics and role playing. He has leader, and although he is constantly new .” no money in Blizzard Entertainment, facilitating movement, he resolutely Warcraft’s creator, but the hours he has refuses to exercise power, instead letting invested rising through the game’s solutions bubble up through the guild’s rankings would probably have sufficed to membership. He prefers to work the produce a doctoral dissertation. And he people issues, counseling a guild member is constantly in touch via e-mail, i-chat with bipolar disorder to take his and cellphone with the many members of medication, or shifting play hours to his guild, a diverse body scattered accommodate an emergency room around the globe, across demographic nurse’s changing schedule. Guild groups and age levels. members live around the world. Players advance in World of Warcraft “In World of Warcraft, much of what by engaging in a series of quests in which you learn is how to improvise or they must battle autonomous foes to accumulate the resources you need, and

International KK, an American company trying to offer the investment is less than $100,000, and while he’s invested in first commercial Internet service in Japan. They couldn’t find hundreds of companies, he only boasts about four of them. space to rent, so he lent them the bathroom in his apartment. He sits on numerous boards, including the New York Times He served as CEO of PSINet Japan — the company that Co., the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John acquired IKK — for a year and eventually moved them into a D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. real office. With his portfolio companies and volunteer activities Thus began a remarkable career as a serial entrepreneur primarily in Japan and Silicon Valley, Ito spent years shuttling and angel investor. After leaving PSINet, Ito launched Digital between and San Francisco, and at one point realized Garage, a Japanese Web solution provider and incubator, he spent more time on United Airlines than in his own bed. which he took public in 1999. The venture firms J.H. Whitney An inveterately social animal, he often stayed with friends in and PSI Ventures seeded his firm Neoteny (the word means his travels, like the Harvard law professor “retention of childlike attributes in adulthood”) with $20 or LinkedIn’s founder , rather than in hotels. million, to serve as an incubator for new infotech companies. He has been a frequent speaker at events ranging from the When incubators fell out of favor with the bursting of the meeting in Davos, Switzerland, to Internet bubble, Ito attempted to transform Neoteny into a the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, which traditional venture fund, but after funding , a brings together technocrats, rock stars and independent company, he returned the remaining cash to the shareholders filmmakers. He may be the one person on earth who would and focused Neoteny’s resources on building Six Apart Japan. be equally welcomed by the bankers inside and the anarchists With his own funds, Ito made early-stage investments outside the next meeting of the World Trade Organization. in , , Technorati, , SocialText, Dopplr, In 2008, Ito and his wife, Mizuka, moved to Dubai Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, Etology Inc, Fotopedia because he wanted to gain a better understanding of the and other social media companies. He says his average Middle East, and he took over the leadership of the Creative

Briefings on Talent & Leadership Q2.2013 49 You should never be able to guess who’ll be the next new fellow by looking at who’s come before.” The first group of fellows includes Detroit community activist Shaka Senghor, chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley, Hollywood producer J.J. Abrams and Nairobi-based technologist and activist Juliana Rotich. The plan is to ramp up to between 20 and 30 active director’s fellows by the end of 2013, with about 10 in residence doing hands-on, day-to-day research at the lab. Ito says the lab’s faculty members were initially skeptical about the program, but have come to respect it. “When I first talked about these fellows, there was lots of concern about what these people were going to do. After I brought them in, people said, ‘Now I get it.’ We would not normally have found Commons, a nonprofit organization that has produced these people because they’re not part of the lab’s network, but alternatives to copyright for the distribution and sharing of bringing them in had substantial impact,” he says. original material. In this role, Ito became a vocal advocate of The lab is supported by close to 80 members, including emerging democracy and the . some of the world’s leading corporations, and the Knight “The single most unique thing about Joi is his lateral- Foundation. These members provide the majority of the ness,” says Howard Rheingold, author of “Net Smart, How lab’s $35 million annual operating budget, but uniquely, do to Thrive Online” (The MIT Press, 2012). “Joi always has been not direct their research funding in any way. “We don’t have very comfortable communicating with and moving in very deliverables, and the funding is not based on grants,” Ito different worlds. He’s welcome at the hackers convention, says. “Grants are incremental; you ask for money for the serious one in Amsterdam, but he also will talk with something you’re already building and problems you the CEO of . I don’t think anyone else has that kind of already sort of know the answer to. We’re answering reach. He knows most of the top journalists, and people in questions you don’t know to ask, and you can only do that the business world, but he also knows the rebels and the with undirected funding.” geeks. He has a very strong ideological dedication to the kind That the lab is essentially unfocused is a strength of liberty that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the disguised as a weakness, Ito says. Focused research might Creative Commons represent, liberty for individual users to provide answers to finite questions, giving an incremental be creators of content and new kinds of companies. Yes, he return on a donor’s investment, but really big opportunities will deal with CEOs of giant companies and they will take his arise out of pattern recognition and the kind of peripheral advice, but he is very much on the side of not locking down vision that flourishes in an unfocused environment. the abilities of users to create things like Google in their Peripheral vision allows for more serendipitous discoveries, dorm rooms.” and almost paradoxically, leads to insights with greater Ito will need his talent for lateral thinking at the lab, impact. For example, the lab’s work in advanced three- which has evolved from its early consumer electronics focus dimensional printing might prompt a company to make the to a much more diffuse organization. Current projects run strategic decision to exit manufacturing altogether, a bigger an inconceivably wide gamut from folding electric cars to a decision than whether or not to produce a specific product. program in synthetic neurobiology, led by Associate Professor Ito says one of his goals is to broaden the lab’s donor Ed Boyden, which is inventing new tools for analyzing and base beyond corporate sponsors to include more foundations engineering brain circuits. And while the Media Lab has and wealthy individuals. “I want to see a much greater always been about crossing the boundaries of disparate emphasis on the social side,” he says. “I am connecting disciplines, its current mission goes a step beyond that, with philanthropists so the source of funding won’t only requiring a new word: antidisciplinary. be from corporations, and creating a social network with Ito explains, “Interdisciplinary is you have a biologist lots of people outside of academia. I see us shifting away talking to a chemist. Antidisciplinary means you don’t get to from consumer electronics to ecosystems and communities, say you’re a biologist. If what you’re doing fits within a single systems instead of objects. As the network enables us to discipline, you shouldn’t be here.” He notes that the lab has be more open, we need to collaborate not only with three faculty searches under way, and he says he would love companies and institutions, but with individuals, to find someone in a field that he doesn’t know exists. “We’re engineers and students.” looking for three things: uniqueness, impact and magic,” he Ito is uniquely qualified to lead the lab in this quest says. “If somebody else is doing it, we shouldn’t be. It should because his entire life is like an open-source software hit the world in a meaningful way. And the magic part is project. He famously posted his cellphone number on his important, too; it’s got to be surprising.” blog and has always been happy to speak to anyone whose One of Ito’s first contributions is the creation of the work captures his interest. While Ito professes to have Director’s Fellows Initiative, part of his effort to open the lab no fixed agenda, the common theme among his interests up to the world. “What all the fellows have in common is and investments is always media and media-created that they are passionate leaders in their fields, and that they communities. From to wikis to his passion for the embody the lab’s uniqueness, impact and magic,” Ito says. multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, “They’re also all passionate about collaborating with the lab. these are all instruments that allow people to communicate

50 Q2.2013 Korn/Ferry and collaborate in new ways and that, in turn, give rise to A sampling of lab endeavors gives a hint of the breadth new kinds of organizations. of its more than 300 research projects, led by 26 faculty and “He’s one of the few people I’ve met, particularly among 140 students. Consider Object-Based Media, led by V. Michael venture capitalists, who really understand social networks Bove, which asks, what happens when self-aware content online, and he understands because he digs in and gets his meets context-aware consumer electronics? Bove’s group hands dirty full time,” says Jimmy Wales, founder and chief makes systems that explore how sensing, understanding and promoter of Wikipedia. new interface technologies can change everyday life, the ways Ito has long been known as self-taught Renaissance in which people communicate with one another, storytelling, man, who attended a few classes at Tufts and later the and entertainment. University of , but dropped out to work as a club Or take ’s work with personal robots. D.J. and to organize raves, the giant dance parties fueled by Breazeal and her students have developed numerous electronic music and, often, the drug ecstasy. Ito says he is creations, including robotic flower gardens. Other projects driven by a boundless curiosity, a horror of boredom and a include embedding robotic technologies into familiar desire to be where smart people are changing the game. “Just everyday artifacts, like clothing, lamps and desktop about everything I get involved in has a steep learning curve, computers, and creating highly expressive humanoids — has a lot of unknowns, and has risks. It may be a kind of including the well-known social robot, Leonardo. Ongoing addiction and obsession. Just as some people are research includes the development of socially obsessed with money and are willing to do intelligent robot partners that interact with boring things day in and day out to be humans in human-centric terms, work with wealthy, I’m obsessed with always humans as peers and learn from people being in a state of wonder and as apprentices. The ability of these doing things with robot systems to interact, learn cool people. from and effectively cooperate “He says he’s found with people has been evaluated his perfect milieu in the in numerous human-subject Media Lab, where the experiments, both inside sheer breadth and depth the lab and in real- of the research projects world environments. challenge even Ito’s And it’s not all bits and remarkable capacity for bytes either. , self-teaching. While the an avant-garde composer, lab flourishes by being has produced a number of unfocused, Ito says he has contemporary symphonic works to be more focused than ever and an opera of the future, Death before just to keep up. He is and the Powers, which tells the moving his wife, mother-in-law story of a successful and powerful and their four dogs to Boston, and businessman and inventor reaching even thinking about having children. the end of his life and facing the question For the first time in his life, Joi Ito is of his legacy. He is now conducting his final putting down roots. experiment, passing from one form of existence “Right before I joined, I was still flying around the to another in an effort to project himself into the future. world every month,” Ito says. “Partly because I had to stay in Machover asks, is it possible to see sound, or touch sound, America to get my visa, I spent six months in Boston, getting or to have sound touch you so deeply that it can change your to know the lab and the students. Now I’m traveling about mind, your body, your life? And he answers yes. half the time, and 90 percent of that is lab-related, going Nicholas Negraponte is currently on leave from MIT, but to conferences, meeting with partners. I’ve never been so he keeps his hand in, and Ito says they meet often. “The lab is focused in my life, and I still need to spend about half my about reinvention. That’s also one of its core principles, and time right here because the operational stuff is very people- I think it constantly needs to be changing.” Ito says. “In that oriented. I’m much more local than I’ve ever been. For the sense, I’m supposed to be pushing for change. Nicholas and first time in my life I don’t have jet lag all I spend a lot of time together now. And we disagree on half the time.” the things we discuss, pretty vigorously, and we agree deeply The scope of the lab’s research projects has kept Ito on the other half. Even when we disagree, it’s useful, because on the steep part of the learning curve where he thrives. Nicholas is very good at explaining why he feels the way does. “Probably the thing I’m weakest on here is the biology stuff, He is very supportive of me pushing the lab in directions that but it’s also the most interesting,” Ito says. “I couldn’t do it, are slightly uncomfortable. They’d rather be uncomfortable but I can explain a lot of it now, which is kind of my role. I than stagnant.” tend to have one big cognitive model that I put everything into, rather than individual disciplines. We have tremendous depth and it may look random if you just walk through, but Lawrence M. Fisher has written for The New York Times, Strategy + there are consistent narratives here.” Business and many other publications. He is based in San Francisco.

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