HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL 9-606-064 MARCH 17, 2006 H. KENT BOWEN FRANCESCA LINO The Whitesides Lab The main purpose of our research lab is to produce ideas that change the way people think about science. — Professor George Whitesides Early in his tenure as President of Harvard University, Dr. Lawrence Summers signaled his view that science should play a bigger role in the mission of the University and across society. Harvard's rich tradition and scientific excellence within its Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Medical School, and associated teaching hospitals offered a model for success. However, tradition, size, and organizational complexity created barriers to the development of new models (or advancing science and translating it to benefit society. With recently acquired space in the Allston area of Boston and new access to substantial financial resources, the university had the opportunity to influence the way academic science and its commercialization would be done in the future. In the fall of 2003, President Summers convened a task force on science and technology to identify needs and opportunities in scientific research at Harvard. Such an assessment would ensure that in a rapidly changing world, Harvard would continue to engage in the most promising areas of science and engineering. It also would provide advice on the allocation of resources—physical and financial—and how to organize scientific activities geographically, given the new opportunities in Allston. The potential was extraordinary because the area was underdeveloped and unprogrammed. The task force recommended that a group of initiatives be clustered in Allston within two complexes of approximately 500,000 square feet each. All the initiatives, which were seen to exemplify the kind of interdisciplinary activity that new ways to collaborate would benefit, could be divided into two groups of initiatives. The first included chemical biology, innovative computing, stem cel