Edward B. Roberts (born 1935) is an American expert in advanced technology management and entrepreneurship, and senior faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, a serial high-tech entrepreneur and a leading angel investor. His Entrepreneurs in High-Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 1991) won the Association of American Publishers Award for Outstanding Book in Business and Management. His own entrepreneurship is as prolific in academia as in industry.
Roberts is sole Founder (in 1990) and Chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, now renamed the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and for over 30 years chaired the MIT Sloan School of Management's Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group. Those activities followed his earlier leadership in the founding of the MIT Enterprise Forum, now worldwide with 28 chapters. Professor Roberts co-founded and co-chaired for nearly 20 years the mid-career MIT Management of Technology (MOT) Program, MIT's first degree program offered by two Schools. Over the past fifty years Dr. Roberts has become internationally known for his research, teaching and active involvement in many aspects of technology management, including technology strategy, corporate venturing, product innovation management, and technology-based entrepreneurship. He became the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology in 1974, and served as co-director of the MIT International Center for Research on the Management of Technology. Most recently he co-founded in 2006 and became the Chairman of the MIT Sloan School Entrepreneurship and Innovation MBA Track. Prior to all of his MIT activities in technology management,he was a founding member in 1958 of the MIT System Dynamics Group under Professor Jay Forrester, and later of the MIT Sloan School's programs in health care delivery.
Roberts is a co-founder, board member and angel investor in many high-tech start-ups. He co-founded in 1963 and was CEO of Pugh-Roberts Associates, an international management consulting firm specializing in system dynamics, strategic planning and technology management, sold in 1990 to PA Consulting Group. He co-founded in 1969 and is a director of Medical Information Technology, Inc., commonly known as MEDITECH, a leading producer of healthcare information systems, and also co-founded in 1995 and is a director of Sohu.com, Inc., a leading Chinese internet firm that was among the very earliest in China.
In addition Roberts co-founded and was for 18 years a General Partner of the Zero Stage Capital and First Stage Capital Equity Funds, a group of venture capital funds investing in early-stage technology-based firms. He later became a co-founding (and then the longest serving) member of CommonAngels, Inc., the largest angel investment group in Greater Boston. Over many years Roberts has been a director of numerous emerging technology companies (and co-founder of many of them), including Advanced Magnetics (now AMAG Pharmaceuticals), Inverness Medical Technologies (now part of Johnson & Johnson), Interactive SuperComputing (sold to Microsoft), InTouch Systems (sold to Comverse Technologies), Pegasystems, and Tyco Laboratories (renamed Tyco International). In addition to Meditech and Sohu.com, Dr. Roberts's current Board memberships include Daktari Diagnostics, Dyno-Media (Beijing), PR Restaurants and Visible Measures Corp. He has also served on advisory boards for numerous companies and government agencies, including the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (1967-1970) and the U.S. Department of Commerce Technical Advisory Board (1967-1972), as well as task forces of the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Research Council, and the White House.
He has authored 160 articles and eleven books, the most recent being "Innovation: Driving Product, Process and Market Change" (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2002). In 2009 he and his PhD student Charles Eesley published a major report, "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT", which documents the history of entrepreneurship at MIT and demonstrates the enormous economic impact generated by companies founded by MIT alumni. That report was updated in 2011 and published by NOW Publications. Roberts holds four degrees from MIT, including an S.B. and S.M. in Electrical Engineering, a Master's degree in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Ph.D. in Economics. He has been involved extensively and for many years in efforts to stimulate the high-tech entrepreneurship of Israel.
Famous quotes containing the words edward b, edward and/or roberts:
“There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx’s Capital.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)