In this episode, cohosts Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Mim Plavin-Masterman are joined by Ben Saltoff, the ecosystem builder-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
Guest: Ben Soltoff, Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) and the Ecosystem-Builder in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship [@EshipMIT]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-soltoff/
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/bensoltoff
Hosts:
Alejandro Juárez Crawford
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford
Miriam Plavin-Masterman
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
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Episode Introduction
In this episode, cohosts Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Mim Plavin-Masterman are joined by Ben Saltoff, the ecosystem builder-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. With a focus on transforming academic technology into real-world applications, his role involves guiding students through the complexities of entrepreneurship, particularly in the context of climate technology.
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Special Note: We have not been able to contact our producer or the students at the BRAC University Social Impact Lab who contribute vitally to this podcast. Our thoughts are with these students and everyone in Bangladesh. We respectfully ask listeners who appreciate the podcast to please make people aware of events there.
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Resources
Ben's book on climate entrepreneurship. More info will be available here starting next week: https://climateandenergystartups.com/
Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship: https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/
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For more podcast stories from What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford and https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
Bringing Biodiversity to the Innovation Ecosystem | A conversation with Ben Soltoff | What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Episode Title: Bringing Biodiversity to the Innovation Ecosystem
Ben Soltoff (00:01.311)
So are you two familiar with Studs Terkel, the radio journalist? He used to always bring way too much equipment to his interviews. There's some story I heard from my documentary writing professor, Duncan Morell. And he would just bring these heavy things and microphones and wires. He would find as much as he could. And he would spend the whole beginning of his interviews setting it up, setting it up so much that the interview subject,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:04.224) Yeah, totally. Love Staster.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:05.262) Yes.
Ben Soltoff (00:30.591)
would offer to help, would maybe be a little bit confused, but it definitely lowered the tension of the interview because here's this awkward guy setting up all these wires, maybe needs the interview subject to help and make it a team sport. And he did that intentionally to have them open up, to help break down the tension. And it was a tactic of his and it worked really well. He got these very authentic, very open interviews and he got to that point sooner.
because the whole setup process was part of it. And I always love that and I always think of that.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:03.008) It be -
It'd be great if he went further and further with it, right? He's like, this worked really well. I got these disarming interviews and then suddenly he started having bulldozers and cranes and equipment, mining equipment, just really went full on into it as far as he could go.
Ben Soltoff (01:22.431)
I hired those guys with the jackhammer outside.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:25.376) That's right.
Ben Soltoff (01:27.263)
Yeah, it'd be to be totally honest.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (01:28.462)
I paid the lawnmower, I paid my neighbor to mow his lawn and ate something this morning. So, it's all good.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:34.08)
Ostensibly, my great grandfather was involved in the developing the technology behind the street drill, which is something that I've never admitted and I'm now admitting in a recording. So next time you hear the jackhammer, you know who to blame.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (01:54.35)
OK, so we're going to get right into it this morning. We are joined today by Ben Saltoff, who comes to us from MIT, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They have over 65 research institutes, and he works at one of them that we're going to focus on today, which is the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. It was founded in 1990. So Ben is an entrepreneur in residence. He is the ecosystem builder in residence at the Martin Trust Center. And we want to hear all about what in residence means and ecosystem builder and how they define it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:24.672)
Yeah, what's the picture of the entrepreneur in residence, man? Like, like, what does the entrepreneur in residence look like? Is Ben smoking a pipe? Yeah, yeah.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:24.75)
He's also the Climate Tech Point person.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:30.03)
What's the picture? I mean, I'm thinking Chesterfield sofa. Yeah. A side, a fancy side table, a Tiffany lamp, you know, like very fancy. but right. But then I also have this other image of like, it's all green and everything's like recycled and like, you know, the table made out of mushrooms or something like, like Bermette was talking about.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:40.192)
There's a lot of polished maccogony when you're in residence, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:51.648)
Yeah, there's, there's trees being planted for every polished mahogany table and the leather is regeneratively farmed, right?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (03:00.558)
Right, right. Or you've heard of like a tree grows in Brooklyn. This is like a tree grows at the Entrepreneurship Trust Center. It's like in the middle of Ben's office. There's a giant tree. Like, I'm kind of hoping that it'll be something like that. But to finish my little intro on Ben, because he's so interesting and I want to get people to understand like just all the great things he's doing. He's coordinating MIT's relationship with Australia's Queensland University of Technology.
Ben Soltoff (03:06.747) You
Mim Plavin-Masterman (03:23.886)
He managed a partnership between Boston and Texas to train entrepreneurs for the energy transition. I have so many questions about that, given Texas's whole grid and all that's happening over there. And then he leads the capstone entrepreneurial experience for students at MIT, which is called the Delta V Accelerator. So that is Ben.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (03:42.496)
And I'm Alejandro Crawford and my cohost is Mim Plavin -Masterman. And we're on a mission to make experiments of your own. Feel as normal as watching videos on your phone. Welcome to What If Instead, the podcast. So Ben, with all these fancy titles, we want to delve down into who the people are that you are enabling to ask the question, what if instead they work differently?
Who do you aim to serve in this work?
Ben Soltoff (04:15.135)
The primary audience that I work with is MIT students. I work with a lot of other audiences as well, as you mentioned, Texas students, Australian students, and folks all over the world teaching entrepreneurship and learning entrepreneurship. But the primary audience is MIT students. There is a very robust entrepreneurship ecosystem at MIT. There is a legacy of entrepreneurship dating back to the Rad Lab during World War II, where radar technology,
was first developed, it helped us win that war. And our center was not around then, and a lot of the other things at MIT were not around then. But we are certainly not the only place that entrepreneurship happens at MIT. What we focus on, though, is teaching entrepreneurship. How do you teach entrepreneurship? And we do believe that entrepreneurship can be taught. We think of it like a craft, somewhere between an art and a science, almost akin to pottery. It's something that.
Anyone can learn. It's something that you don't need to be born with the skills to do. Some people learn faster than others, but if you practice at it and if you do enough repetitions, you can build something that is unique, a unique expression of something inside of you. But it's also functional. It's something that has a use. It has a purpose. It gets, it gets a job done. And we think entrepreneurship is very similar to that. And we focus on teaching that.
to students at MIT and others around the world. So the audience I work with is students at MIT, and that means students across MIT, from undergraduates, at the earliest stage of their higher ed journey, to master's students, to PhD students trying to commercialize or explore applications of technology in their lab. And then we also work with a lot of who you might expect, which is business students, MBAs. Our center is located, or it is situated,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:47.2) I'm -
Ben Soltoff (06:13.119)
within the Sloan School of Management, but we work very hard. This is the MBA program at MIT. And we work very hard not to be to what we call Sloanly, which is just working with other MBAs. Because the whole point of having an MBA program, a management program at a place like MIT is to think about the business applications of technology, to think about the business side, and not just how do you make money from it, but how do you turn technology.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:35.264) Yeah.
Ben Soltoff (06:40.383)
into something that has impact in the world, which is what MIT is ostensibly very good at. But a lot of MIT technology just sits on a shelf, sits in the pages of a research journal, sits in these IP logs. And part of our goal is to help folks explore how to bring that out to the world.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:56.128)
So you're making the MBAs do pottery, basically. You're getting the business people. But seriously, it's very interesting. You've spoken about the research that can stay on the shelf, the cross -disciplinary aspects of what you're doing, and this idea, which is something actually I think about a lot, that learning entrepreneurship is like learning studio art. And I actually wondered if you could delve into that for a second. And we can stick with pottery for a minute if you want. So.
Ben Soltoff (06:59.199) You
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (07:26.272)
In your work, what's the potter's wheel? What is the clay? Where does a critique fit in?
Ben Soltoff (07:31.871)
Yeah, I think that's a good question.
Ben Soltoff (07:40.063)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. What is the potter's wheel in this work? Where is their critique? What are the tools that folks have accessible? I think in my work, particularly working with climate technology, there are two tools that come to mind as two of the most important tools in the toolbox. One is what we call primary market research. Others call that customer discovery. And it's that process of going out,
and learning about your customers. Who are they? What do they care about? What are their demographic criteria? What's going on in their world? Who might they have to answer to? So, you know, their demographics, their psychographics, and also their watering holes. Where do they gather? And the reason that we call that primary market research as opposed to the other
names for it is because it emphasizes that primary. A lot of MIT folks, they're very good at research. And so they hear the research part of it when they say, I'm going to go dig up.
as many market research reports as possible, industry analysis, that stuff is great, that stuff is very useful, but the first word we put in there is primary, it's actually hearing it from the source, even observing it at the source. And we've had students put on hard hats and go into a construction site. We've had students go to Boston City Hall and knock on doors until someone will talk to them. We have had students who've gone out and shadowed solar installers to see how they, they,
They operate in a given day. And of course we don't emphasize, you know, breaking the law. There's certain boundaries you don't want you to cross, but we want that immersive experience, that emphasis of you can't do this sitting in a library, sitting at a computer, at least not in its entirety. You have to go out and get it at the primary source. So that's one tool. And then another tool, especially for this kind of harder tech is a techno economic analysis, which is how do you translate from the technical specifications?
to the customer specifications, which usually falls under.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (09:41.44)
Ben, let's jump a little more into the technical and customer connection in a few minutes, because I want to delve into that. But you brought up something really powerful, I think, with this idea that folks are used to doing research in a way where they don't have to put on that hard hat, and they don't have to go to that watering hole. And...
Ben Soltoff (09:48.031) All right, yes.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (10:05.632)
I want to just dwell for a minute on the differences in mindset and process that that entails. Mim, we spoke recently with another guest on what if instead, and you were talking a little bit about how long it can take to do that interview, to try to understand that interview and what a shift in mentality it is from plugging in some search terms. Mim, I wonder if you could speak to that and also you have this wonderful metaphor you use, the difference in finding a book in the stacks versus finding it in Google Scholar.
Can we delve into that a little bit, both of you?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (10:38.51)
So one comment before I give Ben the floor. So as a social scientist, I had to take classes in ethnography and a lot of anthropology kind of mixed in. My sociology PhD has a lot of anthropology mixed in. And to your point, Ben, they're like, go talk to people, go sit, go observe, go do these things. And it's a huge mind -step shift because you're like, well, what if they won't
talk to me? One of the things that you learn is a lot of people don't want to talk to you. And so how do you get them to talk to you?
that introversion that a lot of researchers have, I think, like it's a very safe to go to the library, to go look things up. It's a very safe space mentally, because if you're wrong, nobody knows, right? Like if you ask, if you're like, my question's wrong, no one ever saw you put that thing into Google to ask the wrong question or look up the wrong book. And so, but at the same time, I think it's so important what you're doing to get the students out there to talk to people and ask the questions.
because you find unexpected things when you do it, which to me is like the, you pick the book out of the library or you think it's this book and you go to that section and you're like, actually there's like five other books I didn't even know about. I'm just gonna take them all. So I guess I'm, I have sort of a two -part question and you can answer them in any order you want. How do you get people who are relatively not outgoing?
to go talk to these people and then how do you give them the tools to know that they're asking the right questions?
Ben Soltoff (12:05.791)
Yeah, that is a big question. I always say that we challenge MIT students to do something that is incredibly difficult for them, which is go out and talk to other human beings. Because these are students who are brilliant. Some of them are very socially capable, but a lot of them got to MIT because they're really good at building stuff. They're really good at doing that research. They're really good at digging into books. And
And that's their first mode of attack when they come at a new problem. Let me build something to solve this problem. And that I love that quality about them so much about so many students I'm working with is that they, their first instinct is let me, you know, MacGyver something to solve this problem. and let me find like the coolest possible way to solve this problem with something that I can build via code or via, via, you know, physical objects. and that is a lovely instinct.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (12:42.56) Peace.
Ben Soltoff (13:02.687)
But when it comes to what is sustainable for business, what is something that you can actually use to solve a customer's problem, you need to get the customer perspective. You can't just build the cool thing. You have to build the useful thing, the affordable thing, the functional thing, and that matters as well. And you're not going to know those criteria until you talk to people. And so we have a lot of guidance on how to do that.
You know, we emphasize being in person if possible or at least doing a live call a lot of them say when you okay You have to hear from a customer Well, I'm gonna do a survey and I'm gonna
send it to a hundred people because a hundred people are better than one person But actually one person with full context you can see where they're operating What's going on the things that they did that that you didn't think to ask them? They you know, you can see them hesitate at a certain question. Why did you hesitate there? What is it that?
that I'm not asking that you want to talk about. There's so much value in that, particularly in the initial stages of the learning process, that going out and starting a survey isn't enough. So, you know, we tell them to...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (14:01.632) Mm, mm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (14:09.536)
I love this point you make, Ben, sorry, go ahead. I love this point you make about.
Ben Soltoff (14:14.047) just you know we tell them.
Ben Soltoff (14:20.127)
But just to finish the thought, we tell them to go and have the conversation and to use that as a starting point.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (14:28.704)
I love this point that you made about why someone hesitated. Because I think that even when we're asking questions, you opened up with this wonderful example of Studs Terkel and his equipment set up to make someone comfortable. Even when we're asking questions, so often we can structure our questions in a way that presages the answers. And I remember hearing a...
reading something from a journalist once who said that she had given this interview and she was so proud of how well she'd done the interview and she was talking to her mentor, some veteran journalist, and the veteran journalist said, but your biggest mistake was you asked the follow on question instead of pausing to hear what the person might say next, right? Now I did that to you a minute ago wanting to jump in with my question instead of seeing what you would say next.
But I think you're bringing something out that's really interesting in terms of finding the unexpected when you're trying to innovate rather than building what you expect. I wondered if you could give us an example or a technique that you've been finding effective in this work or in your own experience that enables that unexpected to get found.
Ben Soltoff (15:55.999)
Yeah, an example of how to get at that unexpected. I think part of it is being open -ended. It's not just not asking follow -on questions. It's making sure that that initial question is as open as
possible. A lot of folks want to lead the conversation in a certain direction. And I think a big thing that we work to combat is confirmation bias. These students,
whether we want them to or not have some idea of what the solution is in their head. And so one thing that we work with them to address is don't bring that solution in front of the people that you're talking to. What you want to uncover is the problems. What you want to uncover is what's going on in their worlds. The worst possible questions are, you know, would you use this thing if we were to build it? Would you pay X amount of dollars for this thing if we were to build it?
and they may say, yes, they may say no, but either way, that's not good information because you've led them so much in that direction. You've cut out all of this, this other stuff. You've cut out all the stuff that's in this podcast, the what -ifs instead of, of their world. And you've gone right to your thing. and, and you, there may be other solutions out there that you're not even considering that they could help point you towards. If you hear about those problems, if you hear about.
what else is going on. So it's open -ended questions and really being problem driven, not solution driven.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (17:30.766)
I love this. I have many follow -up questions. But I want to start with the first one that really tags on to what you just said and goes back to the little intro blurb. So you're in this very unique position of working across MIT. You're working with the business school. You're working with the PhDs. You're working with the undergrads. Can you talk a little bit about your background, kind of training and sort of what you've done to give you the perspective to be that linchpin, to be that connector across these?
world that maybe don't speak the same language.
Ben Soltoff (18:03.551)
happy to speak to that. Actually, Mam, you and I share some things in common. I have a background in ethnographic research as well. I studied ecology and environmental science in undergrad at Duke. But my thesis research was really focused on environmental beliefs and attitudes in across the world. And the way that you get at that is talking to people and asking open ended questions and
and understanding what's going on in their world. And so I still find myself using a lot of that in the entrepreneurship world. And actually I think that's been something I find comfortable. It's been something that has really helped make this world more approachable to me because I did not start working on entrepreneurship or thinking about entrepreneurship as a mode of problem solving that really resonated with me until much later.
but cause I started out as, as an environmental scientist and an ecologist. And that's actually why I also liked the word ecosystem builder in my title, because ecosystems make a lot of sense
to me and thinking about things from an ecosystem perspective makes sense. but to get back to the question, you know, so I started with this environmental perspective, this very systems approach to environmental problems. I, worked in sustainable development in the early part of my career, kind of taking these ethnographic lessons of.
you know, working with communities around the world. I did some bottom -up work in India with rural communities, understanding how they might be vulnerable to climate change, how local organizations could help them to adapt. I worked in the international world of climate policy around the time of the Paris Agreement. I worked alongside a lot of folks who helped shape the Paris Agreement, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals, mainly at World Resources Institute, the think tank in Washington, D .C.
So, you know, I've seen these different worlds of sustainable development, policy and science. And then it wasn't until I went to grad school that I really started to dig into entrepreneurship. I did a joint business and environment degree at Yale, at the Yale School of Management and what's now called the Yale School of Environment. And dual masters walking between two worlds, the kind of bleeding heart sustainability folks and the business folks who...
Ben Soltoff (20:27.487)
are actually bleeding heart in a lot of ways as well. That's the School of Management at Yale has a lot of folks who are deeply rooted in social impact, but still having to translate a lot of terms and concepts and ways of thinking about the world. So for your question of how do I... Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (20:41.344) Can we actually?
Ben, can we drill down a little bit into those two parts of your experience where you started out asking what if instead questions about sustainability and the environment and often now are working with people who are technical, right? Who might've started out as tinkerers. I'm wondering if, as you're seeing a generation that we know statistically, majorities of young people now see climate as their gravest concern based on the Pew research. I'm wondering if in your work at MIT,
you are finding there are students who are very concerned with addressing climate in their industries, in their communities or globally, and other environmental problems and how you're weaving that background into the work.
Ben Soltoff (21:31.551)
Yes, I definitely see that as a chief concern for students, especially the undergraduate students coming in now who are very much in Gen Z. This is something they see as very, very relevant to them. I think when I first started working on climate change, thinking about climate change, it was still perceived as something that was coming down the pipe.
coming down the pike soon and it was it was urgent you know I I think about you know when I came into this work as the inconvenient truth era of it it was right after that movie came out and Al Gore was going around and and making his his you know his talk and there was you know these prognostications of things things are gonna go afoul things are gonna get worse and we're gonna see this soon.
but we hadn't quite started to see it. We were seeing some effects, but weren't completely tying it to climate change. And I think now for the folks who are coming into MIT as undergraduates, we're seeing it. You're in the Boston area where we're not seeing as much snow in the winter. We're seeing these extreme storms, these heat waves. It's undeniable that something is going on with the world that we live in. And that does create a sense of urgency. These are also students of the peer cohort of
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (22:41.152) Yeah.
Ben Soltoff (22:57.471)
of Greta Thunberg and others in the youth climate movement. So they're seeing people who are literally the same age as them striking and going off of school and leading movements for change. And so there is definitely a heightened sense of urgency. And I think there's a big desire amongst these students to think about how can I be a part in building solutions? And that may mean, you know, this is going to be my thing. This is what I'm going to dedicate myself to. And others are thinking, you know, where can I be?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:18.176) Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. So...
Ben Soltoff (23:26.655)
part of a solution, where can I contribute in my personal life? It's not like they're all diehard climate warriors, but it's definitely a top of mind concern for a lot of the students I work with.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:39.712)
So I would love to connect what you just said to the focus on understanding the customer, the user at their watering hole, the folks with the hired hats that you talked about.
What was obvious scientifically 50 years ago when Carl Sagan was presenting to the US Congress, as you're pointing out, is now obvious in our day -to -day life. And yet, it might not be hitting me as hard when I'm at MIT, where I've got air conditioning. I'm, in many ways, quite insulated from the front lines of this. I'm wondering how you are using
Ben Soltoff (23:56.063) Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (24:25.12)
the processes you talked about before to get students close to problems or get them to work with people who are close to problems. When we had Sebastian Crowe on here, the Solshare founder in Bangladesh, he said that when he was at Stanford, he was developing a product on campus. And his professor said, this is great. We have this washing machine running and what will be the energy usage pattern. And he had to look at him and say, when was the last time you were in a small Indian village that didn't have washing machines?
How are you dealing with that differential?
Ben Soltoff (24:58.303)
Yeah, that's this is this is a part of the climate entrepreneurship journey that I think is different than other entrepreneurship journeys. And it's something that I've been actively working on how to explore and how to address, which is that to create the most meaningful climate solutions, you need to wrestle with the problem for a while. And you need to wrestle with the problem at a high level for a while before you see.
where you can actually build a meaningful entrepreneurial solution. Jason Jay, who runs the MIT Sustainability Initiative, talks about public problems and private problems. And I think that's a good framework. Climate change is a very public problem. It's something that we experience globally. It's something we experience regionally. It's something that we kind of see as this wider umbrella of a problem, but it's not a narrow enough problem.
It's not a bite -sized problem that you can tackle with a single entrepreneurial venture. So to go from a big public problem like climate change to a private problem that's experienced by a specific customer, and that's what an entrepreneur can tackle is, how do I find a specific customer with a specific problem that I can solve with a specific solution? And there's a journey to do that for climate. I think a lot of entrepreneurs can get started by solving a problem they see,
in their life or something that, you know, they can pick an industry and they can see something that, that the industry is facing or someone in that industry is facing. But if you're starting with climate change, that affects every industry. So you don't even know where to start from an industry perspective. So there's this process of, of breaking down the problem. And that means where are emissions coming from? Who is dealing with the worst impacts? What is going on in this complicated system? And you have to.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (26:42.592) Mm -hmm.
Ben Soltoff (26:51.295)
Walk through that, understand that, do a personal bit of a reconciling of, okay, within all of this, what excites me? Where do my skills fit in? Where is there a place that I can achieve meaningful impact? And then you start to narrow in of, okay, I can build these kinds of solutions
for these kinds of customers or in these kinds of industries. And then you can start to do that primary market research of narrowing to a specific solution.
but there's this wider process, which we've started to call the dirt road. And it doesn't just apply to climate, it can apply to health and education as well. And the idea is that, you know, we teach entrepreneurship, we've kind of paved this road. It's not a super highway necessarily, but there's at least a paved road that you can navigate once you know how. But that dirt road before it, we don't have a lot of resources. You're almost just kind of cutting through the jungle at that point.
trying to get to something that you can put on the paved road. And we've been exploring how do you do that dirt road. I did a program last spring that was all about that exploration. And we had guest speakers, each of whom was wrestling with a different problem. And they spoke to folks. And we also had the students go out and try to find problems that interested them. And each week, they had to find problems within a different category or just something that sparked their interest.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (27:55.552) Hmm.
Ben Soltoff (28:16.575)
and we had this seminar discussion where they said, why were you interested in this? What sparked your curiosity here? And I don't know if that's exactly the best way to do it. We were kind of trying, we were being entrepreneurial. I could see this being a new class, but this was more of a, you know, an on the side program and not for credit program. But students love that exploration and that early exploration is a key first stage of the journey and sometimes a long first stage.
for students who come in wanting to build climate solutions.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (28:48.302)
So to pick up on that, so you're doing that within MIT, but you're also, it sounds like, trying to do that in Texas, and you're trying to do that in Australia. How are you trying to make that translation from sort of the big collective action problem to the small problem when you're not there in person on the ground with the folks in Australia dealing with their issues? And how do you help them find the dirt road when you're not there to even see the road, right? Or the same thing in Texas?
Ben Soltoff (28:58.143) Mm -hmm.
Ben Soltoff (29:18.527)
Yeah, I think with those examples that you mentioned and those bodies of work, one of the big things we've been doing is working with partners in those places. And so I said our primary audience is MIT students, the students who are around us who are, we see hundreds of
students come through our centers during the semester and they're interacting with each other. We are very up close with them.
with those other universities, we're working very closely with the educators there. We're working really closely with the teams there to share how we do things and to share some of our process and our methodology. And so another audience for us is entrepreneurship educators. And given that our center has been, I would dare to say a leader in entrepreneurship education, we have a lot of open source tools that we share with them. We have a framework of entrepreneurship.
education that we call disciplined entrepreneurship. There's a book of the same title, came out 10 years ago and a 10th anniversary edition just came out this year. There's a workbook to go along with the book. There is a book that my colleague Paul Cheek wrote called Startup Tactics that came out. So we have these books and tools, but we also make a lot of our slides and lectures available. We make a lot of our approach available. We do, we gather educators at our center and sometimes we go to them.
We tell them how we run our center, how we teach our classes, how we run all of our other programs. And so we work with the educators. And on the Texas work in particular, I go to Texas a lot myself.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (30:55.104)
Let's pick up on your construct with the dirt road and the paved road and maybe we can make it three. So there's paved roads, there's dirt roads and there's bushwhacking because you talked about going through the jungle. So we're going to add bushwhacking to it. And I wonder if you could think of both examples of folks who are actually doing it and examples of the partner organizations you're working with.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (31:07.598) you
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:23.68)
and specifically delve into this equipment you're talking about, the frameworks, the books, the methodologies. How are you building the bridge between the framework and the bushwhacking or the exploration on the dirt?
Ben Soltoff (31:43.263)
I think part of the issue is that a lot of the resources I talked about are the paved road. It's the entrepreneur circle. I would add the highway on the other end and the highway is the really kind of established pathways.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:48.736) Mm -hmm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:53.888)
I was thinking whether we should have super highways and local highways. Yeah, go ahead.
Ben Soltoff (31:56.671)
Yes. We've tried to make entrepreneurship a, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's maybe never going to be a super highway. It's never going to be that simple, but we've tried to make it a paved road from like, when you have a private problem to actually building a company. And I think what we've now been thinking about only in the last few years is how do we maybe go from bushwhacking to a dirt road or even a paved road for that. But, but let's, you know, it's, it's always going to be a little rough at that early stage.
So how do you go about that that bushwhacking in an organized way? And actually, I think that was a big reason that I was brought to the Trust Center in the first place. The role, you mentioned this role, entrepreneur in residence, that's my title, you know, with the leather bound armchair and the library full of books. But the idea of that.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (32:40.462) Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (32:42.656)
It's plant based, it's jackfruit based leather, we now know. Yeah.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (32:45.582) You
Ben Soltoff (32:46.559)
Yes, mushroom leather maybe. So the purpose of that role is to bring someone who's not an academic, to bring someone who's been on the journey that students can learn from as they're going on the journey. And a lot of folks who've been in that role have been generalists, they've started a lot of different types of ventures, they may bring a specific industry, but they're brought because they're serial entrepreneurs, or they've started a company that's got a journey that's...
really relevant to share with the students. And the thinking of bringing me onto this role, I've been part of some startups, but also been in more ecosystem building roles. And I added that ecosystem builder part myself. That was my addition because I think that better describes most of the work I've done.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (33:30.208) Hmm. What, what, but you -
Would you get into that actually your experience doing ecosystem building and tell us a little bit of an origin story and then how you're applying that?
Ben Soltoff (33:43.743)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I again, I mentioned that I was initially trained as an ecologist, specifically a forest ecologist. And I think this, the principles of ecology, how do complex systems work, how do resources flow through them? How do all of the players in that ecosystem feed off one another, compliment one another, interact with one another?
I think that was one of the things that drew me into environmental work in the first place and put me on the path that I'm on. So I like talking about ecology and my ecology professors might be a little bit horrified at how I kind of generalized these very scientific principles, but I think there's a lot of great lessons from them. And I like that word ecosystem building because I think a lot of what makes an entrepreneurial ecosystem work.
is a lot like an ecological ecosystem. It requires diversity. There's different pathways to success. There's this concept of nature that folks like of survival of the fittest, which is true in a micro lens. If two organisms are competing for the same resource, one of them will probably survive. But the whole reason we have biodiversity is that there's all these niches, there's all of these resources out there. So if...
you know, something loses out on chasing one resource, it chases a different resource. And there is there's enough different strategies that we have incredible biodiversity in the world. So it's not survival of the fittest necessarily. It's, you know, survival of millions of different creative strategies. And so I think that's very relevant entrepreneurship as well. And, you know, for this ecosystem is that, you know, you find these different niches, you find these different little pockets.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (35:28.704) Mm.
Ben Soltoff (35:38.015)
where different sorts of structures can thrive. And so that's why I like that term ecosystem building. And I think I've been in a role now, particularly at universities, where I've supported entrepreneurship and supported students on the entrepreneurial journey. And I think that the support that they need is that ecosystem approach. It's not, you know, you go to one center and you get everything you need. It's, you know, you get the curriculum at the trust center and you get...
the funding somewhere else and you get additional mentorship somewhere else and you get peer support somewhere else and you build your own portfolio and your own pathway to the set of support and resources that you need.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (36:11.104) Right.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (36:14.944) Totally.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (36:23.744)
You know, Ben, we have time for one more full question, which is going to be MIMS. But I just want to pick at this idea of biodiversity and pick at I don't mean take it apart in a bad way. I fear that in the world of innovation, sometimes our paradigms aren't really conducive to that biodiversity within innovation and entrepreneurship. And it's a.
If you take a great competition like MIT Solve, that or Earthshot or any of the big ones, they tend to be structured like the Hunger Games, where you have a few winners that get a splash and maybe generate a great result. But then you have thousands, tens of thousands.
And I'm not convinced we have enough of a process to enable lots of things to bubble up the way they do in nature. So I don't know if you have a nugget of wisdom on that or even a challenge you're facing, but that consumes me as you make this analogy deeper.
Ben Soltoff (37:31.423)
Yeah, I think it's a great point. And I think that there's some ways that we elevate entrepreneurs that don't always support that biodiverse approach to it. There's also, I've run a lot of entrepreneurial prizes and I think that there's also value to that. I think you need to celebrate wins and I think you need that kind of pomp and circumstance and celebration. But even for the winners, we talk about a winner's curse, they get complacent and winning.
$100 ,000 in a prize competition is not the same as getting paid $100 ,000 by a customer. And to survive, you're ultimately going to need to get paid $100 ,000 from one or multiple customers and much more. And if you're not able to pivot to that, that's not going to be successful.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:05.76) Mm -hmm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:15.776)
Yeah. And in nature, like if you think of a lot of different plants growing and a lot of mutations happening, there are big wins, right? There's a species that can become dominant and that's an evolutionary win, but there's a lot of other things happening. So I am consumed as we come to the close here with what it would take to allow, to better nurture or at least make possible that kind of biodiversity. So we have time for one more question.
Ben Soltoff (38:27.359) Absolutely.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:45.024) And Mim, I know you have many.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (38:46.926)
Yes, I do. So my last question is actually, could you talk a little bit about your upcoming book and how it fits into your ecosystem and your work in kind of encouraging biodiversity?
Ben Soltoff (38:59.583)
Thank you, ma 'am. I appreciate that. As I'm writing a book, I have to learn how to talk about my own work and my own book more often. So appreciate the prompt for that at the end. I mentioned my colleague's book, Bill Ouellette's Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Paul Cheek's Startup Tactics. The publishers, Wiley, are really interested in expanding that into a franchise. And so what we pitched to them was let's do one for climate, for climate and energy in particular.
What does this process look like specifically for climate? Because what I've seen working with climate entrepreneurs is that they face a different set of steps. It's a slightly different parallel journey. They have to think about things in a different way. And I think there's a lot of books out there that are about how to go about the entrepreneurial journey. A lot of great books, not just the ones that come from our center at MIT. And there's also a lot of great books about the climate solutions that we need in the world.
you know, at a high level, what sort of things are we going to need in the next decade, two decades to avert the worst impacts of this crisis? I don't see a lot of books at the intersection of that, of how do you actually go about building a climate solution? What does that look like? What's unique about those steps? And a practical guide for the entrepreneurs themselves, for the folks who want to build that, folks like the students that I work with.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (40:09.056) Mm -hmm.
Ben Soltoff (40:23.103)
So that's what this book is gonna be. It's gonna build off of what we're good at at our center, which is teaching entrepreneurship. And it's gonna have a lot of case studies from the successful entrepreneurs with different archetypes, but case studies of those entrepreneurs and how they went through that journey. So it'll be very practical and it'll have real steps that you can take if you're working on something like this.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (40:47.598) And when does it come out? All right.
Ben Soltoff (40:49.151)
August 2025, it comes out in August 2025, is the planned publication date.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (40:59.552)
Ben, I can't wait to read it. And thank you so much for being with us here on What If Instead. It's a great pleasure.
Ben Soltoff (41:08.319)
and a pleasure for me as well. Thanks for having me.