Week 7: Leave Stanford arrive in Harvard
Flying from West to East coast of America takes approximately 3500km and 7 hours, almost the length of the trip to get from the UK to America.
Highlights this week included Northbridge Venture Partners: a chance to network over free food and drink with local entrepreneurs, a Harvard Business School Case by David Ager focusing on IDEO and quite possibly the highlight of the whole experience in America meeting Dean Kamen of DEKA.
Its difficult to describe Dean Kamen; we arrived at DEKA for lunch and sat in the board room to wait for him. In the mean time a multi millionaire from Switzerland came to join us along with 2 people from a well known web company. Dean entered the room, a short to medium build man who always wears a Denim Shirt and Denim jacket (there are pictures on the wall of the boardroom of him shaking hands with various past presidents wearing the same outfit) and for the next 2 hours captivated the audience talking about his history and what he is working on now.
To say that Dean Kamen is a prolific inventor is an understatement. By the time he was my age (24) he had created the lighting for the New York City Christmas lights, made a kidney dialysis machine which revolutionized the way diabetes were treated. He has also invented a heart stem, drug dispenser, iBot and the shame of it all is that the one invention he is known for in the UK (if any) is the Skegway.
And the story doesn't end there, Dean has also solved drinking water problems in the 3rd world. Poor drinking water is the worlds biggest killer. National governments and intenational bodies have thrown huge amounts of money at research to try and solve the problem (some estimates at $trillion!!) without resolving it. And now Dean Kamen has a solution. As a group of 16 engineers we walked round Dean's company in awe.
I really think it was a life changing experience to find out that there really are people in this world who have the drive, genius and money to make big changes happen: another great example of this being Ewin Marion Kauffman and the legacy he left in the Kauffman Foundation.
Highlights this week included Northbridge Venture Partners: a chance to network over free food and drink with local entrepreneurs, a Harvard Business School Case by David Ager focusing on IDEO and quite possibly the highlight of the whole experience in America meeting Dean Kamen of DEKA.
Its difficult to describe Dean Kamen; we arrived at DEKA for lunch and sat in the board room to wait for him. In the mean time a multi millionaire from Switzerland came to join us along with 2 people from a well known web company. Dean entered the room, a short to medium build man who always wears a Denim Shirt and Denim jacket (there are pictures on the wall of the boardroom of him shaking hands with various past presidents wearing the same outfit) and for the next 2 hours captivated the audience talking about his history and what he is working on now.
To say that Dean Kamen is a prolific inventor is an understatement. By the time he was my age (24) he had created the lighting for the New York City Christmas lights, made a kidney dialysis machine which revolutionized the way diabetes were treated. He has also invented a heart stem, drug dispenser, iBot and the shame of it all is that the one invention he is known for in the UK (if any) is the Skegway.
And the story doesn't end there, Dean has also solved drinking water problems in the 3rd world. Poor drinking water is the worlds biggest killer. National governments and intenational bodies have thrown huge amounts of money at research to try and solve the problem (some estimates at $trillion!!) without resolving it. And now Dean Kamen has a solution. As a group of 16 engineers we walked round Dean's company in awe.
I really think it was a life changing experience to find out that there really are people in this world who have the drive, genius and money to make big changes happen: another great example of this being Ewin Marion Kauffman and the legacy he left in the Kauffman Foundation.
Labels: Harvard University, Silicon Valley
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