Founder, Innovation Teams Initiative, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation

Senior Lecturer, MIT School of Engineering

Biography

Ken Zolot founded MIT's Innovation Teams ("I-teams") program, where multidisciplinary teams of students collaborate with MIT lab directors, evaluating go-to-market strategies for breakthrough discoveries. I-Teams is a partnership with MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Ken's newest class is 6.078 ("The Founder's Journey"), for aspiring first time entrepreneurs who are undergraduates in the School of Engineering. Ken also co-teaches the X-PrizeLab class at MIT, in partnership with The X-Prize Foundation.

In 2009, Ken was named a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, to advise the Foundation on its new initiative "Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation".

Ken's teaching and mentoring have guided numerous MIT-spawned companies, including A123 Systems, Arch Therapeutics, Brontes3D, HubSpot, Myomo, QD Vision, Robopsy, Saaf Water, Semprus Biosciences (fka SteriCoat), Sensobi, Vertica Systems, and Visible Measures.

In addition to his work at MIT, Ken has held full-time founding roles in several startups, most recently Heartland Robotics, which Ken co-founded in 2008 with Rod Brooks, former Chief Technology Officer of iRobot and Director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2000, Ken co-founded Egenera, Inc., along with Goldman Sachs' Chief Technology Officer Vern Brownell. Egenera was named to Red Herring's list of "100 companies most likely to change the world". Ken's previous startup, Geer Zolot Associates, was a spinoff from MIT Project Athena. Geer Zolot developed network security software for electronic trading and commerce, and designed the Internet security architecture for much of the financial services industry. After the sale of Geer Zolot Associates, Ken was retained by Goldman Sachs to guide its technology strategy. Ken has also held positions at MIT Project Athena, and at Digital Equipment Corporation's Innovative Technology Research Center in Cambridge. Zolot's first start-up was Spectra Communications, specializing in satellite telecommunications.

Ken serves on the global Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, and is an active advisor to numerous organizations involved in advancing entrepreneurship, including TechStars, Youth CITIES, and Common Angels. Ken partnered with retired Harvard Business School professor James Cash in launching "The Cash Concours", a program for fortune 100 Chief Information Officers to promote peer-to-peer exchange and learning. Ken served on the founding team of the MIT Portugal Program, and launched Portugal's BioEngineering Innovation program. Ken served as a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Future of Banking. Ken also served as a director of Yoga301, which focused on advancing the art, science, and practice of the timeless discipline of yoga.

Mr. Zolot holds a Master of Science degree from MIT in Management of Technology. His undergraduate work was at Syracuse University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy.