When you are lucky enough to get the position to meet your heroes, there is always an inevitable sense of disappointment.Actors are boring and self-obsessed, sport stars are always smaller in real life, and politicians are, well, politicians.
Today, I was lucky to meet one of my real academic heroes and the man who created, single handedly, much of the entrepreneurship infrastructure that makes MIT the innovation hotspot that it has become today.
Even at the grand old age of 74, Professor Ed Roberts is a giant amongst academics and one of my personal heroes.
It was the work that Ed did in the 1960s and 1970s which laid the foundation for much of the knowledge we have today on technology-based companies and his research was the inspiration for my own Ph.D on technical entrepreneurship in the UK.
His talk today about the effect of MIT on the US economy was a tour de force and even in his 70s, he has the power to inspire and, most importantly, surprise us.
For example, his recent review of the entrepreneurial legacy of MIT demonstrated that foreign MIT alumni were 50 per cent more likely to be starting their own successful businesses than their US counterparts.
As he said today "About 30 percent of MIT’s foreign students form companies, of which at least half are located in the United States. Those estimated 2,340 current firms located in the United States but formed by MIT foreign-student alumni employ 101,500 people. In other words, talented foreign-born students attending MIT play an increasingly important role in creating U.S. companies, making MIT a magnet for worldwide talent that significantly benefits the U.S. economy".
That is exactly the sort of talent we need to attract to the UK and, more specifically, Wales. However, by pandering to the xenophobes in our society, the recent changes to visa regulations by this government means that it is going to be even more difficult to attract the brightest and the best to this country and the economic loss will be ours.
I managed to have a few words with Ed after his lecture and he was charming, funny and full of knowledge. It was a privilege to meet him twenty one years after I first read his articles and hopefully, we can get him over to the UK next year so he can get some of his important messages across to our policymakers.
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