Creating the entrepreneurs of the future

for latest updates visit: www.cambridge-mit.org summer 2004 issue 2 synergy page 8 drug discovery page 10 “early success” CMI’s biannual magazine page 2 distance learning Computer science fiction Creating the entrepreneurs of the future becomes reality Cooling London’s heat island Startups go global innovation – national networks – education – research – competitiveness – entrepreneurship 2 synergy Cambridge students run experiments across the Atlantic Picture courtesy of Clark Colton. Cambridge University Students viewing MIT heat exchanger data online Prof. Clark Colton and his team at MIT preparing for the experiment Chemical engineering students in Cambridge have just been experimenting with controlling a heat exchanger 3,279 miles away, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They have been taking part in ‘Weblabs’ experiments that are being conducted via the internet. The experiments are not only novel but relevant, says Cambridge chemical engineering lecturer Dr Markus Kraft, as “the use of remotely controlled processes is widespread in the chemical industry.” The experiments are taking place thanks to the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which is supporting what Kraft describes as "a fantastic co-operation" between the Departments of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge University and MIT. This collaboration on web-based teaching is giving first- and second-year chemical engineering students at Cambridge a unique opportunity to use one of MIT’s ‘I-Labs’ (remote online laboratory experiments) – a technology that has been available to MIT students for over two years. “Understanding and knowing how to control heat transfer in technical systems is very important,” says Dr Kraft. “Knowing how to calculate the rate of cooling is a fundamental skill needed for processes ranging from controlling a nuclear reactor to controlling the pasteurisation of milk.” “And there is an extra aspect,” says Kraft’s colleague, Anders Selmer, who has been developing the ‘Weblabs’ experiments for the Cambridge students. “At the same time as teaching fundamental skills, we are also exposing students to a web interface and control software that is widely used within industry.” This is a key issue, agrees Dr Andrew Bayly, Process Development Manager at Procter & Gamble: “I think it is important that students are aware of up-to-date tools in the process industry”. Students have so far responded positively to the experiments. “It was very interesting to use a real piece of quite juicy kit, and to operate it over the web,” says second-year chemical engineering student Cameron Saxby. “It gave us the chance to put some theories into practice, and it really helped me to understand what process design and control is all about.” “It’s very different”, says fellow student Andrew Peevor. “I hadn’t had any experience of using a web interface to manage a technical system. But I liked the fact that when we made adjustments, the graphic displays showed the effects immediately, and we then had to decide how to respond to those changes.” The project continues. The next step will be to develop an experimental set-up, based at the University of Cambridge, to be used by students from both Cambridge and MIT. For more information about the ‘Weblabs’ heat exchanger experiment, visit: http://heatex.mit.edu or http://www.cheng.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/ como/proj.wbt.news.html “Knowing how to calculate the rate of cooling is a fundamental skill needed for processes ranging from controlling a nuclear reactor to controlling the pasteurisation of milk.” In Massachusetts, Prof. Clark Colton and his colleagues Sid Sen and Faye McNeill have set up the heat exchanger experiment for online use. So when the students at Cambridge University sit down in front of the computer screen and connect via an internet interface, what they see is temperature data and information about hot and cold water flow rates inside the MIT heat exchanger. This is graphically displayed on their screens by state-of-the-art software used in the process industry. Working in groups of three or four, the students then have to use their knowledge of process design and control to manage and observe certain of the heat exchanger’s operations. synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute synergy 3 CMI: gaining recognition and delivering results What’s in this issue? 4 5 education Spirit of free enterprise CMI focus on research Nuclear waste – are crystals the answer? 6-7 special feature CMI boosts student entrepreneurship 7 news Start-ups go global Prof. Ed Crawley, CMI Executive Director, with successful CMI student entrepreneurs Prof. Michael Kelly, CMI Executive Director, at CMI’s Competitiveness Forum 8-9 CMI special feature on Knowledge Integration Communities Speeding up drug discovery & Evolving the connected world 9 news Science fiction becomes reality… The views of the Executive Directors The two-way process of Knowledge Exchange is at the heart of the CambridgeMIT Institute’s (CMI) mission. Recently, our work in promoting Knowledge Exchange has produced a number of results. Firstly, after conducting a study of CMI last year, the National Audit Office congratulated us on the challenges we had set ourselves and highlighted the impact that successfully meeting those challenges would have on the UK economy. (See page 10.) As we explained to our sponsors during the winter, our projects are meeting around half the agendas identified in the Treasury's Lambert Review of BusinessUniversity Collaboration and the DTI Innovation Report. Indeed, many projects have now been running for more than two years and the results are coming in thick and fast, along with highly relevant examples of international best practice. Students on CMI’s Masters programmes at Cambridge University are successfully acquiring a mix of both technical knowledge and business management skills – as shown by the number who were finalists in Cambridge University Entrepreneurs' business plan competitions. (See page 6.) Since Science Minister Lord Sainsbury referred to these programmes as a model for other courses in a speech in March, we have passed information about them to other universities. A growing number of students who have taken the CMI Connections (now known as the CMI Enterprisers) courses have started up their own projects. (See page 4.) And there are examples of real knowledge and capability integration inside our Knowledge Integration Communities (see pages 8-9), and in some of our integrated research projects (see the research features on pages 5 and 11). Over the last six months we have launched some new educational initiatives. One is aimed at defining a new undergraduate curriculum in the area where mathematics, systems engineering, biology and medicine meet in the postgenomic age. Another is aimed at reintroducing more practical, project-based learning to engineering education. Both are designed to meet the future needs of employers. Over the next six months, we intend to mine our projects for further models of good practice in knowledge exchange, and to engage systematically with more businesses, both large and small. 10 news NAO report highlights ‘early success’ of CMI 10 course update Sustainable development in the spotlight 11 CMI focus on the environment Taking the heat out of building 12 outreach Promoting competitiveness & Engaging with industry synergy Written and compiled by Rachel Simpson and Tracy Moran The Cambridge-MIT Institute Ltd. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 327207 Email: r.simpson@cmi.cam.ac.uk t.moran@cmi.cam.ac.uk Design and typesetting by Mark Werner Symmetry DPM Ltd. Tel: +44 (0) 1480 492555 Email: studio@symmetrydpm.com synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute 4 synergy Spirit of free enterprise A growing number of students from the CMI Enterprisers courses (formerly called CMI Connections) have gone on to set up their own projects. • Sebastian De Bandt, a student from Warwick University, returned from the course in Durham in January 2004 determined to co-found the University’s first Entrepreneurship Club. He says, “The students from Warwick decided the training they had received during the course would be further developed through the creation of their own entrepreneurship-oriented society”. AddVenture is now up and running, supported by the Mercia Institute of Enterprise. It is currently organising the 2005 Warwick Bizcom business plan competition, and hoping to boost both the prize money and the level of participation. For more information, visit www.warwick.ac.uk/go/addventure. • Another Warwick student from the January 2004 course, Tom Welbury, is now researching and planning a future tourist venture. Tyne of Your Life will serve as a ‘city break’ planner to cater for tourists who want to visit Newcastle upon Tyne, a city with a vibrant night-life and a growing number of tourist attractions. For more information, see: http://www.tyneofyourlife.com • Michelle McDonagh, 20, an economics student at Queen's University Belfast, attended the course in Strathclyde in August 2003. She has gone on to set up her own theatre company, Teenworkz NI, which aims to encourage a love of the arts among schoolchildren and teach them drama in a fun and practical way. Michelle says that the CMI Enterprisers course “triggered this idea for me and taught me how to make it happen”. The CMI Enterprisers courses are encouraging a number of students to launch businesses and projects. How does an economics student successfully launch a men’s fashion business before leaving university? For undergraduate John Garner, the answer lay in attending a CMI Enterprisers course. Modelling JG Neckwear John, a 22-year-old undergraduate at Durham University, launched his ‘JG’ menswear business in December 2003. This was just 11 months after he had participated in one of the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s weeklong CMI Enterprisers courses designed to encourage UK students to develop their entrepreneurial skills. The first collection was JG Neckwear, a range of hand-made ties, John Garner unusually decorated with buttons. "I wanted to make a product that people could wear to feel stylish and exclusive", John Garner says. "I wanted to make the type of tie that could be worn for special occasions – weddings, nights out, television appearances – and would suit people who had the confidence to be noticed for wearing something slightly different". Since December, the first collection has almost sold out. The second is now being designed, and JG is working hard to expand its range of stockists in the UK, and in France and Spain. Two years ago, John had never dreamed that he would be launching a business while still at university. He was anticipating that after completing his economics degree, he would follow a career in banking. But then he took part in the CMI Enterprisers course (formerly called the CMI Connections course) in Durham in January 2003. In just one week he gathered the advice, confidence and contacts he needed to start finding investors and applying for loans so that he could start the business. "The course showed me the help that was out there and made me believe that it was actually possible", he says. As well as giving him advice on business plans, the course also introduced him to North-East entrepreneur Max Robinson, who subsequently became the business’s mentor and chairman. JG is now expanding. New ranges are planned, including shirts, jeans and suits that all incorporate the button theme. JG ties are already being worn by a number of high-profile clients, including footballers Joey Barton (from Manchester City) and Lee Bowyer (from Newcastle), as well as ITV sports presenter Gabby Logan and Casualty actor Ian Kelsey. John recently set up his second business, G&T Lifestyle. This will run competitions offering people the chance to win things they aspire to own or to experience, including Porsches, Ferraris, and special holidays. The competitions are launching in June 2004. "Life is good – I am meeting people, and going to places that I wouldn't have dreamed of", says John, who during the last six months of his degree course has been attending lectures and sitting exams in between visits to potential investors and stockists. "Without the CMI Enterprisers course, what I'm doing wouldn't have happened." For more information about the business, please visit its website: http://www.jgneckwear.com. For more details of forthcoming CMI Enterprisers courses, please see: http://www.cmi-enterprisers.org synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute CMI focus on research synergy 5 Nuclear waste – are crystals the answer? Research team looks for new answers to the problem of safely storing radioactive waste In May 2004, the environmental community was split by the claim from leading environmental scientist James Lovelock that only a massive shift to nuclear power as the world’s main source of energy could curb the disastrous effects of global warming. Lovelock is well-known as the scientist who developed the ‘Gaia theory’, that the planet Earth is self-regulating. But environmental lobby groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace immediately rejected his claim, pointing to the fact that nuclear power has created a problem greater than the one it solves: namely, how to dispose of radioactive waste safely. Many scientists feel it is imperative that more research is conducted into alternative forms of radioactive waste storage. In the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Cambridge, Prof. Martin Dove and Dr Ian Farnan have begun studying ways of safely encapsulating radioactive waste materials in research projects funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute and British Nuclear Fuels. The CMI project is bringing them together with a team of colleagues at MIT led by Prof. Linn Hobbs, professor of materials science and engineering, and nuclear engineering. A computer simulation showing the damage caused by nuclear decay in a crystal of zircon Going back to nature “We know that there are some minerals found in nature, such as zircon, which have contained radioactive atoms for geological periods of time. These materials are crystalline, in that the atoms are arranged in a repeating symmetric pattern,” Prof. Dove says. The team has used both experiments and computer simulations to study zircon. The researchers have been tracking the internal damage caused by the radioactive atoms when they decay, and whether that damage degrades the safe storage capacity. In Cambridge, the scientists have been running the simulations. Their colleagues at MIT have been developing topological analysis approaches to evaluate those simulations. “We have generated animations that show how the atoms spontaneously rearrange themselves in the damaged region to create a protective shell, thus minimising the effects of the damage,” says Prof. Dove. The team is now shifting its focus to finding even better materials for storing radioactive waste safely that can also be produced on an industrial scale. The materials will have to be tested to see how they respond to radioactivity and how easily the atoms can dissolve out of the encapsulation material. For more information on the CMI project, visit http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/movies where the team is showcasing a number of the animations produced from its computer simulations. The animations can be viewed at the following addresses: http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/movies/rad1.mpeg http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/movies/rad_par1.mpeg http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/movies/rad_per1.mpeg http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/movies/rad_per3.mpeg Environmental dangers “Our worry is high-level radioactive waste with long lifetimes, such as plutonium. The question we are addressing is, how can we store this in a form that has long-term safety built in from the outset?”, says Prof. Dove. In the way that a balloon loses air even when there are no apparent holes in it, so storing radioactive waste over long periods of time may lead to radioactive atoms escaping from their storage medium even when there are no apparent leaks, and posing environmental dangers. Prof. Dove’s team is tackling the issue by going back to nature for the answers. At the moment, cast borosilicate glass is the preferred storage material both in the UK and US. In the UK, glass is used to store the small amounts of radioactive waste that are not recycled in the process of transferring plutonium and uranium from fuel rods to be reused in reactors. In the US, meanwhile, glass is used for larger tanks. But the CMI team is interested in other materials. synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute 6 synergy CMI special feature CMI boosts student e A team of students from a CMI programme aimed at fostering bioscience entrepreneurship has won the top prize in Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ £50K business plan competition Winners of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ 2004 competitions, including Dr Nora Szasz and the bSure team (centre) and Dr Sonja Marjanovic In May 2004, Dr Nora Szasz and her fellow students Richard Reschen, Rebecca Downing and Tamara Rajah received £30,000 to help them set up their business bSure. All four are taking the BioScience Enterprise MPhil programme at Cambridge University – a course developed with CMI funding to create new biotech entrepreneurs. bSure owns the rights to a novel technology for testing the blood of expectant mothers for foetal genetic abnormalities, like Down’s syndrome, earlier than can currently be done. Dr Szasz, who filed a patent on the technology in January 2004, was inspired to set up the company after witnessing the “three weeks of emotional agony” her sister-in-law suffered while awaiting the results of an amniocentesis test. She says: “The amniocentesis, today’s Gold Standard test for Down’s syndrome, is done from the 15th week of pregnancy onwards. It involves inserting a five-inch needle into the womb to draw off amniotic fluid and carries a one in 300 risk of miscarriage. Patients can wait several weeks for the results. bSure’s technology promises results within hours from a simple maternal blood sample taken at eight weeks”. summer in labs in Cambridge. The next hurdle will be raising finance to get the product through clinical trials. Dr Szasz says, “Our initial estimate is that we will need somewhere around £3.8 million. We are doing more rigorous estimates right now, and deciding how much to raise in the first round of finance.” bSure was just one of four business plans entered by students from the BioScience Enterprise programme. This is one of six new MPhil programmes at the University of Cambridge set up with the support of CMI. Inspired by the Professional Practice Programs at MIT, they offer students a discipline base in science or engineering alongside modules in business and technology management. “We actually offer students a percentage of the course marks for getting involved in entrepreneurial activities – like entering the £50K competition,” says Professor Chris Lowe, Director of the Institute of Biotechnology at Cambridge where the programme is housed. Ms Huber says the technology the startup business has developed can prevent fruit flies from copulating soon after birth. “When you breed fruit flies, you have to watch the females hatch and, as soon as they do, you have to pick them out, separating the newborns and segregating them by gender so that they don’t reproduce with their siblings,” she says. Researchers in this field want virginal fruit flies so they can control all breeding. “We have a technology for keeping fruit flies virginal which would save scientists an awful lot of time, money and boredom,” she says. Lecturer’s win It isn’t just BioScience Enterprise students who are starting up businesses, but academic staff on the course as well. Dr Sonja Marjanovic, who lectures Virgin research Amongst the finalists in the 2004 competition, there was also an entry from a former BioScience Enterprise student. Marie Huber, a 26-year-old biochemist who graduated from the course last year, set up Cambridge Laboratory Innovations Ltd with four doctoral students after spotting a business opportunity in an unlikely place – the virginity of fruit flies. The next step Dr Szasz, who holds a PhD in BioEngineering from MIT, is now working hard to get bSure off the ground. Tests on human blood samples will start this Cambridge Laboratory Innovations’ eye-catching poster synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute synergy 7 news >>> Startups go global ntrepreneurship Student consultants do the business A course that (temporarily) turns CMI Masters students into business consultants for local companies has resulted in some very satisfied customers. All students studying for CMI’s Masters Programmes at the University of Cambridge – including the Technology Policy, BioScience Enterprise and Engineering for Sustainable Development MPhil programmes – take a module in the Management of Technology and Innovation (MOTI). As part of this, they work in teams on a onemonth business consultancy project. Students’ supervisor Dr Mark de Rond from Cambridge’s business school, the Judge Institute of Management, says: “They tackle real issues – for example, researching the market for a new product the company is developing.” This year, students from CMI’s BioScience Enterprise programme went to work as consultants for Grant Instruments. This is a Cambridgeshire-based company that makes and distributes general-purpose laboratory temperature control products and sample preparation equipment. The company wanted to investigate the potential opportunities for exploiting an entirely different type of laboratory product that also had applications in other environments. So the students were asked to analyse possible markets for it beyond the laboratory market. “Because these were students from the BioScience Enterprise course, they were quickly able to acquire a very good understanding of the technology of the product and the various technologies of the products offered by competitors,” says Jackie Rush, marketing manager of Grant Instruments. “We thought that they would look at markets for which the product would need adapting. But in fact they looked at markets in which the product could be used as it is. They gave us several ideas for new markets that we weren’t expecting, and for which we are most appreciative. Their brief study of the legislation was also beneficial – as we needed to know whether there was any existing or pending legislation that would drive the requirement for this product.” Another customer for the students’ consultancy services was Genapta – a business that recently grew out of Cambridge University’s Physics department, and now develops equipment for researchers studying reactions in biochemistry. Genapta wanted to look at the commercial implications of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies moving from conventional, well-based drug screening techniques to micro-fluidic-based formats. Julian White, co-founder and CEO of Genapta, says: “When the students did their research, we got an unexpected bonus – they found that in terms of market potential, if we had an ability in micro-fluidics, we should be considering the diagnostics market rather than pure drug discovery, because they concluded that there is significantly more activity there.” He adds, “In terms of the time invested by us, and the quality of the outcome, the project feels really worthwhile. The students came to a quite unexpected conclusion that has alerted us to a potential new market for our products that we will be considering.” Global Startup Workshop delegates Two hundred delegates from 40 countries came to the University of Cambridge in March to attend the 2004 MIT $50K Global Startup Workshop. The event, sponsored this year by the Cambridge-MIT Institute, is an annual conference for the organisers of student business plan competitions. It advises students who want to set up such competitions, and provides new ideas for organisers of established contests. The Workshop is run by the organisers of the MIT $50K Competition – which during its 15 years has launched more than 80 companies worth more than $4 billion. This year, the venue was Cambridge, and participants came from as far afield as Scandinavia and New Zealand to share ideas and best practice. Speakers at the event included venture capitalists Dr Hermann Hauser, founder of Amadeus Capital, and Bill Reichert, President of Garage Technology Ventures. They led a lively discussion on the success stories of Silicon Fen and Silicon Valley, and how business plan competitions can help to grow these high-tech clusters. According to Dr Hauser, such contests are one of the most effective ways of stimulating economic growth as intellectual property is transferred from universities to industry. Cambridge University Entrepreneurs – the student group that runs Cambridge’s business plan competitions, and co-organised the 2004 Workshop – would agree. They are setting up a consulting arm, Sparkplug, that recently helped get a business plan competition underway at the University of Auckland. The Auckland competition – called Spark* – has so impressed the New Zealand government that it is now supporting plans to transform it from a universitywide to a nationwide event. students on the diseases of poverty and the role of biotechnology in addressing them, collected a prize in the £50K’s sister competition, the ‘People, Planet, Productivity’ contest. Infectious diseases Dr Marjanovic and her team members (Ilian Iliev, Nicholas Ross, Dr Charles Pritchard, Dr David Rubin) are setting up DiagnovIS – a business developing a new accurate, affordable and accessible method for doctors in the developing world to diagnose infectious diseases, including malaria and African sleeping sickness. “We are really delighted to win this award,” says Dr Marjanovic, who has been in discussions with World Health Organisation officials about DiagnovIS. “It’s a valuable affirmation of our business, and our business plan.” The BioScience Enterprise programme is one of six multi-disciplinary Masters programmes at the University of Cambridge funded by CMI. For more details about the programmes, please visit: http://www.cambridge-mit.org/ education/graduate synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute 8 synergy CMI special feature on Knowledge Speeding up drug discovery A Workshop in May 2004 brought academia and industry together to hear about one of CMI’s new Knowledge Integration Communities – the Next-Generation Drug Discovery community. One of CMI’s newest Knowledge Integration Communities – the NextGeneration Drug Discovery Community – is bringing together an unusually wide range of disciplines. Aiming to address bottlenecks in the discovery of new drugs for diseases like diabetes and cancer, the Community embraces not only biologists and medical researchers, but also physicists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. The rationale is that if we are successfully to develop new therapies for diseases with complex causes, then we need to employ a multi-disciplinary, ‘systems biology’ approach. Such an approach is already being employed at MIT and is endorsed by pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca. It is needed because the human body works in many, very complex ways. The sequencing of the human genome has made a vast array of information available about these, but has also created some misconceptions. MIT’s Prof. Doug Lauffenburger, one of the leaders of the Community, says: “Everyone thinks that now, surely, we should be able to find those genes that cause disease, and which ones to correct. But actually, it is far harder than this because organisms are very complex.” understand what is happening within the human body. The information offers us huge opportunities, but scientists need to develop the skills and the computational methods – as this Community is trying to do – to make use of them. Dr Gos Micklem, from the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University, is part of the Next-Generation Drug Discovery Community. He says: “There are major computational challenges involved if we are going to make sense of all the data and use it to start building systems-level views of life and disease processes. But as we start to do this, and take into account the genetic variation between individuals, this opens up new possibilities in evaluating disease susceptibility, improved diagnosis and the ability to offer therapy tailored to each individual patient.” Members of the Next-Generation Drug Discovery community for the function of the gene, so that you can predict what the effect of the variation will be. Diabetes research “Not all genetic variations are informative,” he adds. “What you want to know is: what are the important ones and what are the less important ones?” This is not a simple question. The international community has already identified over 15,000 protein changing variations that could be the pre-cursors to common diseases like cancers, cardio-vascular diseases and diabetes. In addition, scientists are also trying to identify the regulatory sequences that switch genes on and off. For computational biologists the challenge – when all these data are available – is finding ways of integrating, visualising and analysing it. This was one of the topics discussed at the NextGeneration Drug Discovery workshop in May, which was attended by more than 60 academic researchers and 40 representatives from industry. Dr Micklem is also working on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust to create a new tool for putting genomics data into a computable form. “The challenges are firstly, to gather the information, and secondly to integrate it – not into a book that you can browse, but into a form more akin to a spreadsheet, so that you can do data analysis and ask the data complex queries”, he says. Such computer tools will be used by members of the Community as they study the development of blood stem cells and the genetics of diabetes. For more information, please visit: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/ BIO/2sbkic.html Major challenges The community is bringing together computer scientists with medical researchers to study the role of genetic variations in diseases like diabetes and cancers. Variations in the genome sequence are very important and fundamental to many diseases. Only a few years ago, a biotech company that was spun out from Cambridge University’s Genetics Department identified mutations in one gene that were causing several individuals to have severe insulinresistant diabetes. Computational biologists, says Dr Micklem, have a role to play in helping to understand the significance of such genetic variations. “You can spend a lot of time in a laboratory, studying people who have the disease and people who don’t. But in principle, computers may be able to replace a vast amount of laboratory work, and also be used to model the consequences of the variation Invading bacteria Just how complex is demonstrated by the human immune system. The relatively small number of antibody gene parts can be rearranged to generate one thousand billion variants in order to be able to create enough antibodies to recognise the molecular shapes of all invading bacteria or viruses. To understand and predict how such complex living systems operate requires an approach that combines a variety of skills, including computer science. The more we know about human genes and the sequences that regulate them, the more data we have to analyse to try and synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute Integration Communities synergy 9 news >>> Science fiction becomes reality… Evolving the connected world economics, public policy, management sciences, engineering and computer science. CII will also include industry and government, not just as passive recipients of learned papers but also as active participants, bringing their real-world needs and problems to stimulate and challenge research. The CII plan for research is framed by a two-pronged approach, each leg of which motivates and nourishes the other. One leg characterizes and models the business structure and value chain dynamics of the industry. In our terminology it lays out roadmaps toward the future. This activity spans communications providers, suppliers, manufacturers, content developers and consumers, and will be done with an international suite of participants who represent the interests and concerns of industry and economic segments. The notion of constructing a roadmap for such a diverse industry is daunting, and extending this to include dimensions of technology as well as use is unprecedented. The EDSAC computing system, circa 1949 “The communications industry is no longer the sole province of its historical members – the broadcast and telephone companies. Its evolution is no longer clear. Worldwide take-up of the Internet and the transition to digital radio have changed the industry’s fundamental structure, the rate of change of innovation, the range of industry participants, and the regulatory environment. The field has been buffeted by turmoil accompanied by an explosion of opportunities around the world.” – MIT’s Communications Futures Program 2003 Back in the 1940s (see picture above), “The thought of having a personal computer was science fiction, and having one that you could put in your pocket was unimaginable.” So says Dr Simon Moore, from Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, one of the project leaders on the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s recently launched Pervasive Computing Community. This Knowledge Integration Community brings researchers at Cambridge and MIT together with industrial partners – including BT – to design computing systems of the future. The aim is to produce systems that will genuinely enhance our quality of life. Victor Zue, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, is leading the Community at MIT. “As cost decreases and availability grows, more and more people will be making use of computers,” he says. “To accommodate this larger and technically unsophisticated user population, we must lower the entry barriers and make computers easier to use.” To this end, the Community will be working on improving speechrecognition and computer vision technologies so that we can talk or gesture at our computers – rather than have to use a mouse or keyboard. Other projects will focus on improving the security, privacy, and power-efficiency of computers. “We have made astronomical technological advances", says Dr Moore. But the challenge is to use these to make our life better. This Community will help, he says. “Research is partly about focused efforts to solve known problems, but also about chance inspirational interactions. This CMI project allows us to pull together the strengths of both Cambridge and MIT, and to allow cross fertilisation of ideas among a significant number of academics and a growing number of industrial partners.” For more information about the Pervasive Computing Community, please visit http://www.pervasivecmi.csail.mit.edu/ CMI’s latest Knowledge Integration Community – The Communications Innovation Institute (CII) – is an initiative to promote the progress of the entire communications industry. It will bring together the recently launched Communications Futures Program at MIT with researchers at the University of Cambridge and at University College, London (UCL) with BT as an industry anchor partner. The computer industry has long been defined by a tradition of constant reinvention. The communications industry has been slow to embrace this sort of rampant innovation, because of its culture, regulatory history and burdensome investment cycle. The so-called convergence of computing and communications is not a happy marriage for the communications partners who see themselves saddled with costs but driven by the innovative turmoil of the computer industry. Nonetheless, the communications industry must deal at an ever-increasing rate with disruptive change, both technically and socially. This is the motivation behind this initiative. Disruptive technologies The second leg addresses the enabling and disruptive technologies that can transform communications from a vertically integrated service that companies and consumers have typically purchased to a distributed one open to locally incremental innovation. In this way the CII can lay out a richer and more diverse future. Working closely with industrial partners, the overall programme will develop the business structures, fundamental architectures and demonstrative applications that show the way. CII is a bold experiment, both in terms of the vision behind the work, and in the manner of industrial cooperation by which it is expected to develop. By reaching across technology, business, architecture, regulatory dynamics and economics, CII will break new ground by building a largescale, multi-faceted programme that guides existing players while at the same time gives a seat at the table to companies who either had not considered communications a core competence or had been excluded from its deliberations in the past. For more information about The Communications Innovation Institute, please visit: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ Research/SRG/netos/cii/ Real world needs The Communications Innovation Institute will cover much more than new technology – and it’s not just about research. The CII initiative is headed by two Principal Investigators: Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Networked Systems in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and Dr. David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The initiative includes researchers and experts from a broad range of disciplines, including synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute news >>> Report highlights ‘early success’ of CMI A study of the Cambridge-MIT Institute by the National Audit Office has acknowledged the considerable potential and early success of CMI. The study – examining the way that CMI was set up, its current and likely achievements and the role of the DTI in managing and monitoring it – was carried out at the request of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. National Audit Office report on CMI In its findings, published in March 2004, the National Audit Office said: “The nature of CMI’s projects means that many of its impacts will not be known for some time – but there is potential for considerable success. “For example, its “silent” aircraft project has brought together organisations from the civil aerospace and aviation industry (including British Airways, Rolls-Royce plc, the Civil Aviation Authority and National Air Traffic Services) to work with Cambridge University and MIT to discover ways to develop a new generation of commercial aircraft that could be virtually noiseless. “CMI is experimenting with different ways to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship – from collaborations between academics and industry to lessons in entrepreneurship for students – to identify what works best.” Sir John Bourn, the head of the National Audit Office, said: “CMI has the potential to generate considerable impacts. Many of these will be long-term and are intrinsically difficult to measure. After a challenging start, I am pleased that CMI and the Department of Trade and Industry have been taking steps designed to maximise long-term success. Public sector organisations are increasingly expected to manage innovation, and we look to them to learn from the experience of CMI to improve their appraisal and management of innovative projects.” Copies of the full report can be downloaded from the National Audit Office website: http://www.nao.org.uk/ 10 synergy Sustainable development in the spotlight A lecture series that accompanies the CMIfunded MPhil programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development has brought some very distinguished speakers to Cambridge University this year. “We may have to make many changes if we are going to bequeath a healthy Earth to our children.” With these words, Sir Crispin Tickell, Government Adviser on the Environment, and former UK Ambassador to the United Nations, began his talk on Ecology, Conservation and the Human Role. Lecturer, Sir Crispin Tickell He was one of several high-profile lecturers, including Professor Mohan Munasinghe, Vice-Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who talked about responses to climate change; and Professor Richard Carter of Cranfield University, who gave a thought-provoking lecture about the relationship between poverty and poor access to safe water. The aim of these Lectures is to broaden the MPhil students’ perspectives on Sustainable Development. But the talks have also been opened up to the public and have brought interested listeners from all over the UK. Though the theme is Sustainable Development, the speakers have approached the subject from many different viewpoints. Biodiversity Sir Crispin Tickell spent his talk discussing the ways in which human living conditions have improved dramatically since the industrial revolution – resulting in dramatic population increase and subsequent land degradation, water pollution, climate change and damage to biodiversity. “This acceleration in the earth’s transformation is not sustainable”, he said. He argued that while scientists and environmentalists have successfully won widespread public awareness of the perils of climate change, they now have to do a similar job in enlightening people about the importance of biodiversity, so that we don’t take natural systems for granted. Public transport The week before, the subject had been very different when Fred Salvucci gave his Lecture on Sustainable Urban Mobility. Mr Salvucci has held a number of posts in Massachusetts’ public sector – including the post of Secretary for Transportation. For many years, he advised on and influenced transport policy and planning in an administration that limited road expansion and focused on expanding Boston’s public transport systems. “All this has produced 30 years of significant investment, many jobs and a healthy city”, said Mr Salvucci. “And despite industry’s initial opposition to the plans, the economy in Boston is doing very well, and business has in fact benefited.” Mr Salvucci concluded that in order to genuinely change attitudes and help reduce fuel emissions, apparently opposing groups will have to work together. “Public transportation should ally itself with industry,” he said. “After all, who is a better friend to the businesses shipping freight along crowded roads than the public transportation system helping to reduce the number of cars on the road?” For more information about the Lecture Series or the MPhil Programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development, please see: http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustdev/mphil.html synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute CMI focus on the environment synergy 11 Taking the heat out of building “This will be the first really sustainable inner-urban building in the UK.” – Alan Short, Professor of Architecture, University of Cambridge Key challenges in the design of an innovative ‘green’ building in central London have been solved, thanks to a Cambridge-MIT Institute/BP project to design low-energy buildings. The building in question is the new School of Slavonic and East European Studies currently being constructed for University College, London (UCL). Its foundation stone was unveiled on 5 May 2004 by the President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski. The building’s architect, Alan Short, the Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University, says that the School will be “the first really sustainable inner-urban building in the UK”. This is thanks partly to the involvement of the team working on the Cambridge-MIT Institute/BP project on low-energy building design. They have modelled a high-tech, ecologically friendly system – combining natural and mechanical ventilation – that will use significantly less energy to cool and ventilate the building than conventional air-conditioning. without using some kind of mechanical ventilation, it is impossible to abide by those guidelines.” Prof. Short is a partner in the £2.5 million CMI project – funded by BP – to design low-energy buildings. So he called on his Cambridge colleagues, BP Professor Andy Woods and the CMI project team, to help him refine the design for the building. Short and Associates had come up with an innovative design for the School. Exploiting heavy masonry to help minimise big temperature swings inside the building, the design also incorporates a central glazed courtyard. This is the conduit for fresh air to flow into the building. It then spills onto the school’s seven floors through carefully controlled dampers. For the summers, when temperatures rise, Prof. Short designed a mechanical “passive downdraught” system to provide additional cooling. This features rings of cooling tubes (looking like old-fashioned radiators) at the top of the courtyard. When the cooling system is switched on, chilled water is fed to these cooling tubes. They cool the incoming air, which then sinks down through the building and is scooped into each floor via bottomhung windows. How UCL’s new ‘green’ building will look reverse,” says Prof. Woods. In order for the warm air to be sucked up the ventilation stacks, it needed to be warmer than the outside air. And given central Prof. Andy Woods London temperatures in summer, the air outside a building is often hotter than inside. “When we discovered this,” says Prof. Short, “we modified the design so that the stale air could drop out of the bottom of the ventilation stacks”. With the design tested, work on the building is now underway, and is scheduled to finish in spring 2005. Prof. Short says it will result in a highly innovative new building that combines “ancient techniques with ones that have never been used before”. He adds: “It is predicted that the passive downdraught cooling system will consume significantly less energy and produce lower carbon dioxide emissions than a typical air conditioned building. But it will nonetheless remain comfortable as global temperatures rise over the next eighty years.” For more information about the Low Energy Buildings project, please visit: http://www.bpi.cam.ac.uk/ Low energy Prof. Short was faced with a real challenge when his architectural practice, Short and Associates, won the job of designing the building. The brief from UCL was to make this a low-energy, naturally ventilated building. But London is an ‘urban heat island’. “In central London in summer”, says Prof. Short, “temperatures are increasing so that it is almost impossible to keep buildings at a comfortable temperature without using air conditioning”. Construction industry codes of practice say that the temperature in a building shouldn’t exceed 25˚C for more than five per cent of working hours. “But the centre of London is warmer than that for longer than that”, says Prof. Short. “So Hot air rises Prof. Short initially thought that as the cool air sank down, the warm ‘exhaust’ air would escape by rising up through the building’s ventilation stacks. But this was tested out by the Low Energy Buildings project team in both a small-scale laboratory experiment, using a water bath analogue technique, and in theoretical modelling. They recognised there was a problem. “We found that potentially, the natural ventilation flow of air might stop, or even synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute contact us 12 synergy Promoting competitiveness In the UK The Cambridge-MIT Institute University of Cambridge 10 Miller’s Yard Mill Lane Cambridge CB2 1RQ UK Tel: +44 (0)1223 327207 Fax: +44 (0)1223 765891 Executive Director: Professor Michael Kelly CMI’s Competitiveness Forum is a series of events, held throughout the year, to bring together business leaders, policy makers and academics to explore issues that will help improve competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship in the UK. Michael Kitson, head of CMI’s National Competitiveness Network, which organises the Competitiveness Forum events, says: “It is important to let policy-makers, business leaders and academics have access to the latest research on competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship”. Sharing findings Events held during the first half of 2004 have focused on the state of entrepreneurship in the UK regions, and the policy options to develop enterprising places. From the summer, the focus shifts to the impact of investing in science and technology. Speakers at the Forum events share their latest findings with attendees. In February 2004, Niki Cleal, project leader of the Lambert Review of BusinessUniversity Collaboration, came to talk about the Review’s findings and the areas of policy where the team was seeking further consultation. In April 2004, academics including Prof. Zoltan Acs, from the University of Baltimore, shed light on the importance of knowledge and new firm start-ups for economic growth. Prof. Acs’ research revealed that the number of business owners has no effect on economic growth and that specialisation can actually be detrimental. Public policy, in turn, should work to promote high-potential start-up activity and education, he said. During the autumn, the Forum will evaluate different forms of social enterprise and how they may improve and enhance regional economic development. For details of how to participate in the Competitiveness Forum and/or CMI’s Competitiveness Summit, to be held in Edinburgh in November 2004, e-mail c.dennis@cmi.cam.ac.uk or visit the CMI website http://www.cambridge-mit.org/events In the USA The Cambridge-MIT Institute MIT Room 8-403 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139-4307 USA Tel: +1 617 253 7732 Fax: +1 617 258 8539 Executive Director: Professor Ed Crawley Engaging with industry The Cambridge-MIT Institute, working with industrial partner BT, is inviting industry leaders to become involved in a series of new Special Interest Groups it is setting up. These groups are initially focusing on industries such as Construction, Retail and Transport. The aim is to bring industry and academia together in a new environment where members can exchange opinions, identify and prioritise some of the key issues facing industrial sectors and look for potential solutions. In May 2004, a visit to MIT was arranged for members of the Retail Special Interest Group. The visitors were offered the opportunity to hear the latest thinking on issues like information technology governance. They also visited a number of MIT labs to examine some of the emerging technologies that may significantly change the way we think about products and services. This included a visit to the Center for Bits and Atoms, which is developing technologies that could revolutionise physical products and the way businesses sell and distribute them. The next Special Interest Group event is for the Construction Industry. Entitled “Changing Lifestyles: Constructing the Future”, it takes place in September 2004. For more information about this, or other Special Interest Group events, please e-mail sig@cmi.cam.ac.uk synergy summer 2004 The Cambridge-MIT Institute For latest updates visit: www.cambridge-mit.org Email: enquiries@cmi.cam.ac.uk innovation – national networks – education – research – competitiveness – entrepreneurship