Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Credit MIT Media Lab building in Cambridge, Mass. Photo by Andy Ryan To stay at the cutting edge, MIT went outside a its comfort zone 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 Timothy Leary. 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 Creative Commons, 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 Japan, 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 Internet 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 Stewart Brand 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 technologies 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 Jerome Wiesner 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 Detroit, where his parents worked for Energy Conversion Devices, which was known for innovations in optical disks, rewritable memory chips and thin-film solar panels. Joi Ito 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 The New York Times. 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.