by fuzzfactor | 2025-06-05 19:04:29+00:00
>In 1972, NSF director H. Guyford Stever established the Office of Experimental R&D Incentives to “incentivize” innovation

>many in the NSF and the scientific community resisted the idea of goal-directed research. Innovation, with its connotations of profit and social change, was even more suspect.

>NSF chose four universities . . . MIT targeted undergrads through formal coursework and an innovation “co-op” that assisted in turning ideas into products.

I remember when 1972 came around.

Leading up to this point there was a fairly legitimate attitude wondering why MIT hadn't yet had a technology that flew off the shelf like the well-known Gatorade had done years earlier for UF.

Not everybody remembers what it was like when the NFL and everybody else was still drinking kool-aid in sports. Only the Gators had Gatorade for years before it was released to the public. Not released by public demand, but at the insistence of competitive teams who had to go head-to-head against the Gators. In a sweatier climate than most people are accustomed to.

It had surely been a while and the success of Gatorade was truly unforeseen, it simply went viral in the environment of the times.

I was quite aware that MIT was conceptualizing one of the first things that would qualify as an "incubator". Might be coincidence that YC originated in that region decades later, but sometimes good ideas fan out most strongly from their origin and mutate as they do it, leaving a trail of migration to some degree.

At Florida they wondered why they hadn't had another "Gatorade" by then either, and school was getting crowded like never before. Even though the rear-guard of baby-boom teenagers was beginning to dwindle, more of them were going to college than had been imagined, plus servicemen were returning from Vietnam with the GI bill. Student loan programs rapidly appeared under challenging conditions to try and keep some sense of continuity for those who were college-bound before the skyrocketing inflation had dashed so many dreams like a bull in a china shop.

So there were a lot of students in a state institution like this, plus it was regarded among the top in the world for innovation just from the Gatorade alone.

At the same time MIT was just getting started with this phase of "innovation", for years there had already been an almost "subconscious" hivemind permeating the campus at Florida, that all students and professors are always being "trained" or training themselves to invent something new, or new ways of making the same old thing.

They were already way ahead but it was no MIT, the flagrant approach at UF was to flunk everybody who they didn't think could invent the next Gatorade :\

MIT was instead investing more directly in some (fortunate) students instead.

Think about which is the more effective approach in the long run.

It's difficult to be correct about who won't invent things, plus reducing headcount to any significant degree always discharges at least one person who is fundamentally more valuable than the one(s) spearheading the attrition.

An incubator is about the opposite when it can provide enhanced opportunity for a greater number of inspired ambitious people than would otherwise have a chance.

Maybe, just maybe, it's not often that an established institution having its own combination of inertia & momentum is the ideal place to contain an incubator.

What if a different kind of institution could be built around an incubator instead?

Who would ever think of that ;)