New products: Research in Prof. Gershenfeld's group on electrostatic tomography for user interfaces was applied in a show by the magicians Penn & Teller (developed in collaboration with Profs. Machover and Paradiso) to channel real fields to contact simulated spirits. NEC saw this and immediately wondered if the same technology could be used to distinguish between front- and rear-facing child seats in order to control airbag firing, which was a literally life-and-death unsolved problem in the auto industry. On the basis of the strong industry response to a jointly-developed prototype, NEC rushed this technology into production; it came out first in the 1999 Acura and has appeared in many other models since. NEC would have never directly funded magic tricks, just as the MIT researchers would have never taken directed funding to work on child seats, but the freedom to mix basic and applied research across project boundaries not only led to an unplanned product, it proved to be essential to NEC's automotive electronics business because it came along just as their conventional airbag controllers were becoming commoditized. Starting from the access to the enabling IP shared with all the sponsors, NEC has established a strong commercial position through the filing of derivative, proprietary field-of-use IP. Sponsorship has also provided a vehicle for working with other companies; through one of these relationships Motorola developed custom chips to make the electrical measurements and is now a component supplier of them to NEC.

New divisions: The heart of the technology transfer and product development with NEC occurred in an unexpected and intense six-month period, at the end of which NEC had a new product group ramped up in an area with proven technological and and commercial promise. At the opposite extreme is LEGO's success in bringing Mindstorms to market with Prof. Resnick and his colleagues. Seymour Papert originally came to MIT before there was even a Media Lab, attracted by the promise of the earliest general-purpose computers as an educational tool for children. LEGO in turn was one of the Media Lab's first sponsors; they recognized that they would not be able to sustain their business by making incremental improvements to plastic bricks in an increasingly-competitive marketplace, and sought fundamentally new directions for the company. Over the next decade LEGO worked with Profs. Papert, Resnick, and their colleagueson realizing a vision of enabling kids to go beyond creating passive structures to let them engineer active systems. This entailed developing everything from the means to embed sensing, actuation, and computation in LEGO's bricks, to kid-friendly computer languages and programming tools, to the pedagogical principles and contexts to give this all meaning. The result was not just a new product but a new line of business for LEGO.

New businesses: Prof. Joe Jacobson came to MIT with a dream of creating electronic books that look as good as traditional printing. Although his background was in quantum optics, he proposed to do this by developing an entirely new kind of display that would have the optical properties of paper but be electronically switchable. The result was the invention of microencapsulated electropheretic electronic inks, which received significant sponsor as well as press attention. To help commercialize the technology, the lead students on the project (Barrett Comiskey and J.D. Albert) elected to start a new company, E-Ink Inc. Following the invention and proof-of-principle demonstration at MIT, E-Ink took on the ~$100M investment in the teams of scientists and engineers required to scale up to industrial production of the inks and display media. This was done with funding from a number of the original sponsors of the research (including Motorola, Toppan, Lucent, Philips, and Hearst), who were interested in both technological and financial participation in the commercial development of E-Ink. For these companies, an effective way to transfer the research was not internally but to an entirely new business, a partnership that was enabled by the sponsor relationships with the students and faculty as well as their IP access.

New strategies: If CBA sponsorship is the equivalent of hiring an employee-equivalent, many companies find this to be a productive investment and expand their involvement. Steps beyond basic sponsorship include Media Labs-wide membership, Corporate Research Partnership which stations employees to run a research program on campus, and finally naming grants for new labs. These higher levels can be thought of as being comparable to establishing jointly-run departments or divisions. All share the same intellectual-property access as lower-level sponsors, but represent significantly greater allocations of research time and attention. This kind of investment goes beyond research budgets to draw on corporate support for functions including business development, marketing, and PR. An example is Motorola's naming of the Digital DNA laboratory. Motorola had been aggressively scaling ICs for greater performance, at the cost of ever-greater investments in increasingly competitive markets. The Digital DNA concept was jointly developed around a strategy of moving into embedded chips for new applications. Following the launch through press events at MIT, Motorola externally developed an advertising campaign around the brand to announce this new direction, and internally used it to retarget development effort. From this process a joint managerial group emerged that was embodied in meetings a few times a year bringing together people ranging from Motorola's CEO and CTO to precocious undergrads. This group blurs the boundary between academia and industry, jointly allocating resources ranging from student theses to fab capacity, resulting in new kinds of products for Motorola (such as the device used in NEC's smart seat).