EP 266 - Eugene Fitzgerald - CEO and Director at MIT Research Enterprise Singapore - You Have to Start with Great Uncertainty

Asia Tech Podcast was fascinated by its conversation with Eugene Fitzgerald, PhD, the CEO and Director at MIT Research Enterprise Singapore.

The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) is a major research enterprise established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in partnership with the National Research Foundation of Singapore (NRF) in 2007. SMART is the first entity in the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) developed by NRF.

Some of the topics Gene covered:

• Working at Bell Labs
• Innovation and the commercialization of Strained Silicon
• His earliest introduction to Singapore
• Somehow Gene’s interests and Singapore’s interests seemed to be in sync
• Managing uncertainty while also managing risk
• How the path of research to market was more complicated than expected
• Finding the balance between research and commercialization

Other titles we considered for this episode, but ultimately rejected:

1. I Was Stunned, Actually…Stunned
2. Every Faculty Member Is Essentially Running Their Own Business
3. I Had No Idea of the Scale Required
4. I Had More of a View of the Future
5. We’re Doing Caricatures of Everything
6. Increasing Man-Machine Interface
7. It’s a Search for Value