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MIT Day 2

Day 2 started at 8am and finished at around 10pm (and that is a light day apparently!) The day was mostly an introduction to MIT and its success story in creating high technology entrepreneurs.

The statistics are startling

MIT students, alumni and faculty have founded over 5,000 companies. Approximately 150 new MIT-related companies are founded each year. These companies now account for employment of over 1.1 million and annual sales of more than £200 billion.

We have already been put into a multinational team and have to do a 55 second ‘elevator pitch’ and a 5 minute business plan presentation at the end of the week. Dragon’s Den here I come!

Apart from lectures, we had a number of business owner-managers come in and speak to us. For example, one of the entrepreneurs we spoke to yesterday had just raised $140 million for a medical devices company with projected valuation of $1 billion.

It is an amazing place and with news from over the pond of the hundreds of jobs being lost at Corus shows that we also need to try and get more entrepreneurship, especially of the high value technological type, in Wales. Certainly, this course has fired me up to do something about this when I get back.

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