Two-Way Innovation Conduit – From MIT to Global Growth Markets and Back

Jun 18, 2025

Nadia Shalaby, PhD, Founder & CEO, Pakira, Inc., Professional Advisor, MIT Kuo Sharper Center, 2011 Student Fellow

What do pink hens, digital twins, and mighty microbes have in common? MIT – and global changemakers seeking to transform their regions.

Bidirectional Gateway between MIT Innovation and Global Growth Markets

Via its motto mens et manus, the mission of MIT is to “advance knowledge, educate students, and serve the nation and the world through science, technology, and other scholarly pursuits”. Within MIT, the mission of the Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship is, in part, to serve as the knowledge gateway to and from global growth markets – building pathways for prosperity via entrepreneurship, better and more jobs, and improving people’s lives.

As MIT innovators (student and alumni entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers) produce new discoveries and technologies, they seek to propagate their commercialization globally, beyond the US and Europe – a challenging endeavor. Similarly, change makers (entrepreneurs, executives, and policymakers) in global growth markets seek access to these breakthrough innovations to adopt and localize back home, also a nonlinear, obstacle-ridden path.

The Kuo Sharper Center, with its knowledge base and expansive ecosystem at MIT and in global growth market regions, is uniquely positioned as a critical conduit for both these communities, in both directions.

Conducted on the heels of our content-packed annual conference, “Innovation in Global Growth Markets: Prosperity through Entrepreneurship.” The Center hosted an MIT Ecosystem tour that illustrated this crucial role of the Center within MIT. This blog highlights real examples of knowledge transfer, collaboration, and potential impact happening both in Cambridge and across the world.

Chemical Engineering for Medtech & AgTech

Since 1950s, MIT has innovated in ion sources, applying the evolving technologies in nanotechnology, quantum devices, and space missions. Now, twin brothers MIT PhDs Daniel Lundberg and David Lundberg, 3^rd gen dental innovators, co-founded T33 Dental, a Medtech startup delivering dental treatment 1000 times faster via such an electrically driven process that is painless and imperceptible. By dramatically reducing the cost of such treatments, this has the potential to democratize dental prophylaxis in growth markets. See investor Elyas Felfoul, volunteering to experience the procedure in real-time!

Our article Fertilizer Production & Food Self-Sufficiency in Global Growth Markets, explains that despite Africa’s explosive 7X population growth from 1950 to today, hardly any fertilizer production plants were built. Why? Because they are prohibitively expensive in CapEx. A subsequent article Deep Techy Might Microbes for Africa, describes a microbial technology developed in Ariel Furst’s MIT Chemical Engineering lab, to enable the production of organic fertilizers at a fraction of the cost – highly attractive for Africa and other global growth markets. Tim Mui, a 2024 Student Fellow of the Center, co-founded Seia Bio to commercialize these mighty microbes in AgTech. We witnessed the growth differential in sample plants, their products, and scaling plans. Several collaborative initiatives were born on the spot to explore piloting this innovation in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Brazil!

Robotics for Manufacturing, Mining, and Healthcare

The origin of Robotics at MIT goes back to Nobert Wiener in 1948. We watched a demo of the IRGO robot where our delegate Marina Bragante provided IRGO with objects, and he learned how to pick them up and place objects to spec.

Growth markets are very sensitive to the cost of consumer goods, and a roboticized approach can boost the efficiency of industrial factories, increasing production yields, thereby lowering cost of goods. 2025 Foundry Fellow Ahmed Nounu for example, is pioneering such an approach at INDOS in manufacturing operations in Egypt and North Africa.

Another application across global growth markets is mining – perilous and grinding work. Applying robotics to another 2025 Foundry Fellow Ayo Sopitan’s company Metalex Africa in Zambia, Nigeria, and Mauritania would help improve yield, and thereby margins, by transitioning manual sorting to the robot.

Three photos of air technology innovation

At the Genomics exhibit, I told the story of the scientific progression and it’s unique story at MIT: from gene discovery, to human genome sequencing, to identification, to editing, to synthesis. From pink hens to utilizing pigs as human pregnancy surrogates, the genomics world is unbounded in capability and fraught with ethical implications. Over the last decade, while gene-editing has been getting cheaper, yet remains prohibitive for growth markets at $100Ms clinical trial tag price or $10Ms for crop or livestock. A promising direction of global scientists is cost reduction and feasibility research, developing alternative and cheaper processes to serve their populations.

Picture of a pink chicken and digital board

In Kent Larson’s City Science Lab, our delegates played with a tangible (atoms to bits) tool that reflects changes in physical spatial design in a city realtime, illustrating the impact on collaboration and the environment. Markus Elkatshu explained how City Science projects worldwide work with city governments, including in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Concepcion, Chile to smartly effectuate such planning. Next frontier are mega metropolises such as Sao Paulo and Cairo – in dire need of this techno planning for efficiency, sustainability, and survival!

AI for Personal Productivity and Political Advocacy

At MIT, the so-called “AI Revolution” was pioneered by my own professor Marvin Minsky, who co-founded the AI lab in 1960s with John McCarthy. And today, the applications are exploding across our personal and professional lives.

In growth markets, entrepreneurs and changemakers are stretched thin across their resources, and regulatory red tape. Two AI startups to the rescue.

MIT Media Lab researcher Cristina Grau from Spain, co-founded Twintual to address our information overload – an explosion leaving little room for productivity. Twintual uses a proprietary AI model to learn the individual’s “persona” and produce a virtual twin to filter through the overload, provide informative summaries, and reply to emails.

Daniela Cuellar Zapa from Mexico, is democratizing access to policymakers and the ability to influence them effectively, for a fraction of the time and cost of today’s processes. Her startup Whipp.ai, collects info on every single policymaker, and then creates an AI agent who models their priorities, allegiances, and behavior, real-time.

Photo of people standing in front of a presentation in an art gallery

Sliver to Impact

Despite our packed schedule, we only explored a minute sliver of MIT technologies and labs, leaving the rest of the treasure trove for later. Even so, most of our delegates, representing different stakeholders of their respective countries, have established connections to engage in some form – be it investment, localization, collaboration, synergies, or education.

“Seia Bio’s fertilizers tech is complementary to one of our companies in Africa, and we should explore a partnership.” - Craig Sharper

Our Gateway Service Goes On

As the MIT Kuo Sharper Center continues to serve as a gateway between innovation at MIT and global growth markets, this tour stands as a powerful testament to what’s possible when ecosystems connect across borders. From robotics transforming labor in mines, to AI tools amplifying civic voices, to sustainable agriculture solutions inspired by the smallest of microbes, each of these rapidly developing innovations will continue to become powerful answers to today’s most pressing challenges.

This tour ignited new relationships and renewed a shared sense of purpose as we continue to shape the New Calculus for Global Prosperity. We look forward to deepening these collaborations and welcoming even more partners who believe—as we do—that growth markets and the innovations being crafted by them both at MIT and abroad, aren’t waiting to be saved. They are ready to lead.