Ben Downing, Vice President of Public Affairs, discussed The Engine Accelerator’s mission to support early-stage scientific entrepreneurs in Massachusetts, particularly those working on climate and energy transition technologies. He highlighted the organization’s efforts to help technologists, founders, and principal investigators commercialize their research and grow the pipeline of scientific entrepreneurs.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Ben Downing: I’m Ben Downing, I work at The Engine Accelerator. The Engine Accelerator is a public benefit corporation created by MIT in 2017. The organization exists to support what we call tough tech, which is tough to commercialize technology generally at the intersection of science, engineering, and a technological breakthrough, focused on one of the biggest challenges facing society. So we work with teams that are working on all aspects of the clean energy transition in a variety of different components, teams trying to build the advanced systems and infrastructure to support that technology across the board as they are coming out of academic research labs.
Generally, they’re going to have a longer path to commercialization, but also the opportunity to have a significant public impact. So we work with those teams to not just have them work towards a minimum viable product but have them try to think about what is their maximum public benefit. How can they grow and scale from there?
George Taylor: So typically companies who work with The Engine, are they mid-size, later stage, or even ideation phase?
Ben Downing: Yeah, generally very early. We work with teams, even before they formally form a team, right? Programmatically and from a consultative perspective, we will work with technologists, and founders when they’re trying to make the decision about if they’re going to commercialize some of the research what that could look like, and what the best path forward is.
We work with principal investigators, and academics, generally, across the country, as they try to think about how can they play a role in the entrepreneurial journey. We want to grow the pipeline of scientific entrepreneurs who are trying to commercialize the research that they’ve dedicated their careers to. We want them to know that that isn’t a process where they have to hand it off to somebody else. We want to grow that top of the funnel, help those ideas, get ready for investment, and then ultimately move from investment to impact.
With a lot of what’s going on right now, you see a marrying of state policy goals, some state initiatives, and then certainly a significant amount of federal activity as well. So here in Massachusetts, we’re lucky to have the Mass Clean Energy Center, the Mass Life Sciences Center, and certainly as well the Mass Technology Collaborative. These are sort of three key quasi-public entities that can provide a level of sectoral support for founders and teams that fall into one of their catchment areas.
And a lot of that work can also be supported by MassVentures, the state’s public venture fund. So you have these handfuls of entities that can engage to support founders, whether that’s through direct investment, whether that’s with non-dilutive support to further the scientific derisking that they’re working on, whether that’s with support around building their team, short term. The Mass Clean Energy Center and the Mass Life Sciences Center have a great internship program that enables early-stage teams to grow their capacity.
Then increasingly the state is trying to catch up with other states in supporting teams as they grow and scale, as we think about your pilot factory facility, especially when you think about sort of the manufacturing side of things. So climate tech manufacturing, biotech manufacturing, some sort of more advanced manufacturing, we think Massachusetts is uniquely positioned to be able to capture that first pilot facility before teams ultimately grow and scale outside of the Northeast.
