Harvard Innovation Labs

When you set out to build a community of young innovators, sometimes magic happens. After all, nobody understands the crazy, stressful, hectic life of an entrepreneur like one of your peers. Harvard Launch Lab members Rong Xia (Raiing Medical) and Will Guillaume Foussier (Ace-Up) talk about how lending a sympathetic ear to a fellow entrepreneur led to empathy, understanding, and ultimately, love.

Three brothers from Costa Rica — Serge, Rolando, and Javier Masis — are building an activity discovery app that is a bit more serendipitous than most other products on the market. Finalists for this year's Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, Serge and Javier sat down with us so that we could find out more about building their company and working together as a family. If you want to see the company (and the 11 other finalists) pitch its product as part of next week's Harvard President's Innovation Challenge Award Ceremony, you still get tickets at www.i-lab.harvard.edu. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

David Raiser is the CEO and co-founder of Aldatu Biosciences, a company that has developed drug resistance diagnostics for HIV patients. Raiser holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard Medical School, while his co-founder and Aldatu's CSO Iain MacLeod has a plethora of degrees — including a Ph.D. in Pathology from the University of Cambridge— as well as an academic appointment at the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative. Together, the pair is leading a push for better, more affordable diagnostics tools, not only for HIV-related applications but also for other infectious diseases, in order to improve the quality of patient care and the cost of healthcare.

Dino Rodriguez, Chase Davis and Christian Ondaatje thought they could build a way to get around some of the gaming and graphics deficiencies of Mac computers. As undergrads at Harvard, they built a device called The Wolfe, an external GPU that speeds up graphical applications such as those that use VR. The company definitely serves a need and is rushing to get its product to market with a little help from Intel. For our latest podcast, I sat down with Chase Davis to talk about the companies growth and some of the challenges they've faced.

Being an edtech startup isn't easy. That's why it's amazing that a company like AllHere, currently based at the Harvard Launch Lab, is about to expand its product reach ten-fold this fall. AllHere's "Chief Idea Spreader" (aka CEO)Joanna Smith sat down for our most recent Harvard Innovation Labs Story to discuss her company's growth and how AllHere had to shift its customer targeting to gain traction in schools. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

With his company Doorbell, Pleat is trying to build more connected communities for people who live in apartments and other similar complexes. Currently, Doorbell is testing its product in Downtown Worcester’s Grid District, trying to bring the up-and-coming urban area together through shared experiences rather than other means. It's quite a noble mission to focus on "in-real-life" community building at a time when other entrepreneurs are focused on growing digital user communities. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

When the i-lab first opened in 2011, Vaxess Technologies, a company co-founded and led by Michael Schrader, was one of the handful of ventures that consistently showed up to work out of the new space. Last year, after a short stint at LabCentral, Schrader and Vaxess returned to Harvard's "innovation campus" on Western Avenue in Allston as part of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab. Vaxess, which, had received about $6M in funding, grants, and awards combined, recently announced that it had received another $6 million grant, this time from the Gates Foundation, in order to continue developing its silk biopolymer technology and to take its innovative vaccine delivery system to clinical trials. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

When Sara de Zarraga and Quinn Fitzgerald met at the Harvard Business School, they both shared a yearning to leverage business to improve the world. Working together they have built a product to help others stay safe and prevent sexual assault and other dangerous situations. With their company, Flare, they have developed a device to notify others of danger or a potential assault. Hidden as a piece of jewelry or other unassuming personal accessory, their device can keep people safe in a wide array of situations. What they're doing with Flare is radically trying to reinvent personal security. And they are close to doing just that.