Edward B. Roberts '58, SM '58, SM '60, PhD '62

INTERVIEWER: Ed Roberts is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management Technology, professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He's the author of Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond, a foundational study of high technology entrepreneurship. Professor Roberts was a founding member of the MIT System Dynamics Group. He is founder and chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and was a founder, and for over 30 years chaired, MIT Sloan's Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group.

Most recently, he co-created and directs the MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship and Innovation MBA track. Professor Roberts is 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 has also been actively involved as a co-founder, board member, and angel investor in numerous high-tech startups.

Professor Roberts has authored over 160 articles and 11 books. He is also the author of an influential study, "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT," exploring and quantifying the impact that MIT entrepreneurship has had on the US economy. And it's worth mentioning that Professor Roberts holds four degrees from MIT. Thanks very much for coming in today.

ROBERTS: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I should be tired from listening to the introduction, but I'm motivated instead.

INTERVIEWER: Sorry it's so long. It could have been longer. So let's just start at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up.

ROBERTS: I was born in Chelsea across the Mystic River Bridge. I grew up there, went to school there through grade school, high school. In high school, I was in the tech course, which today, I'm quite sure, Chelsea doesn't have. But in those days, the tech course was focused on getting high school kids into MIT.

And in my senior year at Chelsea High, three of us applied to MIT. Two of us got accepted and went to MIT. The third one, unfortunately, didn't get accepted to MIT and had to go to Harvard. So I grew up there.

My father was a one-man oil company. He delivered home heating oil to residences and small businesses. And consequently, working with my father from when I was a little kid, I learned a lot about business, but really at a sort of one-man business operation point of view. But I had rudiments of accounting, and competition, and pricing, and everything else that a kid would learn from his father, helping out on a truck and delivering oil to various customers.

INTERVIEWER: So what were you interested in as a kid? Was it technology, engineering, you mentioned business, or was it a combination of both?

ROBERTS: I'm not sure what I was interested in when I was really young. I know that when I was in the sixth grade, we had one of these little essays on, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I know, because I had saved the essay for a long time, I wrote that in the sixth grade I wanted to go to MIT, and I wanted to be a civil engineer. And I explicitly said I wanted to build big buildings and bridges and all these kinds of things, which I guess, to me as a kid, sounded like a very exciting thing.

I have no other track of what my thoughts were in that direction until my junior year in high school when I was getting around to thinking about applying to college. And by that time, I had shifted slightly. I still wanted to go to MIT, but I wanted to be an electrical engineer.

And in particular, the beginning stages of computers were starting to become obvious. And I said that I was interested in computers, whatever that meant, because I had no personal experience with anything that resembled a computer in any form. So that was, as best I can reconstruct, my dream.

The only other kind of touchpoint that I have that gives me a memory of my life relating to MIT was that my family were real great classical music buffs. And consequently, we used to go to the Esplanade concerts of the Boston Pops Orchestra during the summertime. And we did that on Saturday mornings, and we also did that in the evenings.

And I remember distinctly, and I wrote about it in the preface of my 1990 entrepreneurship book, that in the evening, looking across the Charles River from the Esplanade at Memorial Drive, you could see lights on two buildings. One building was the MIT Dome, which was lit at that point in time. And the second building was what is now One Memorial Drive. And it was Laboratory for Electronics.

And the roof of the building was a blazoned logo that had a flashing lightning rod going through the LFE aspects of Laboratory for Electronics. And I remember as a little kid seeing that at night and being intrigued by whatever this thing was that is now One Memorial Drive and the MIT Dome. I knew what the MIT Dome was, but I couldn't imagine what kind of linkage it was on Memorial Drive.

INTERVIEWER: So ultimately, you made it across the river. Your ambition in high school came true. You came to MIT as a freshman. Tell me a little bit about your first impressions of MIT, what it was like at that point as an undergrad.

ROBERTS: I came in, and I knew I wanted to be in electrical engineering from the start. I also knew that I wanted to be involved in student activities. I had been very active in high school. So in my freshman year, I got involved in the Debate Society. I debated for four years. I became head of the Debate Society at MIT. I learned a lot, I think, from that.

I really thought, initially, MIT would be an extraordinarily difficult place. And I was quite panicked about it. I don't know whether every freshman is panicked. I think it's not unreasonable. But I actually blitzed through my freshman year. I got four A's and one B in the first semester, which made me relaxed. And I got four A's and one B in the second semester.

So suddenly, I was now comfortable. And my comfort led me to be very expansive in the things I was willing to take on. And I started getting into not just the Debate Society. I began getting involved in fraternity and other things and the like. So as an undergraduate, I overloaded heavily in my classes. I took 14.01, which was the first course using Samuelson's textbook, as my humanities elective in first semester freshman year. I loved it. And I knew nothing about economics until then.

Second semester, because of the first semester, I took 14.02, which was the second half of the Samuelson textbook, Principles of Economics. I think the book was written a few years before. And beginning in my sophomore year, I started overloading in economics and in management, coming to what was not yet the Sloan School to begin learning more about management but staying with electrical engineering.

In my sophomore year, I got into Electrical Engineering Co-Op, which was a competitive admissions process. And I became a 6A General Electric Co-Op student, which after the fact, I really thought was a remarkable experience. I think that in the four semesters of Co-Op work at GE, that I learned an enormous amount. I learned much more there, I believe, than I did in the coursework that I was taking as an undergraduate.

But by the time I was finishing my graduate degree in electrical engineering, I also was just about done with what was required for a Master's degree in management as well. So I really had this double education during the first five years of my life at MIT and at the same time, very heavily engaged in activities. When I was a senior, I was both vice president of my fraternity, and I was chairman of the MIT Activities Council.

So the Activities Council was the place where all the major activities at MIT were represented. And we did whatever were the policy and governance activities of that. And believe it or not, friends that I made in 1956 and '57 in Activities Council are people I still relate to today as leading MIT alumni and the like. So it's really been astonishing to me how from 1953 through to 2012, there's been so much people continuity in their ties to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Sounded like a busy guy.

ROBERTS: I was a busy guy always. And I remember one of my professors was giving me the business about the fact that I was overloading so much, because I would typically be taking seven courses a semester. And he said that the fact that I was overloading was causing me to not concentrate enough on my electrical engineering subjects and that my grades were suffering. Well, they couldn't suffer that much, because I had to have at least a B average to get into graduate school on the 6A program. But yeah, they were suffering relative to what I perhaps could have done had I focused only on studying electrical engineering activities.

But I said to him than, as probably a 19-year-old kid, that I was conscious that I was making a choice and that my choice was to learn more about a wider variety of things, rather than to focus narrowly. And by that time, when I was a junior, I was pretty sure that what I wanted to do in life was to become an engineering manager, that I wanted to link together my Course 6 background with what I was studying-- and I didn't think I was going to get a degree in it-- but what I was studying in the Management School.

So to me, that was going to be my life. I was going to be an engineering manager, and that would be a really interesting thing to do. And I had that as my view, actually, until I entered my doctoral program in economics. I still thought, even upon entry into a PhD program, that that wasn't what I was going to do, that I was going to quit before I finished the PhD and leave MIT and go out into industry and become some kind of a manager. But I hadn't counted on the experiences that I had when I became a doctoral student.

But I'll tell you maybe one of the most interesting, certainly important in my life, things that happened when I was an undergraduate. I was taking some course in the Sloan School. I have no idea what it was. There was an instructor who was teaching us, and characteristically, in Course 15 in those days, a large fraction of the students were engineering students, not management students. So the instructor made some comment, and he said, you guys think you're so smart. We just had the inventor of the computer join our faculty in the Sloan School.

And I turned to the kid next to me, who was also an electrical engineer, poked him, and said, what in the world is John von Neumann doing coming to the Management School at MIT? Because when this instructor said "the inventor of the computer," my best guess was, well, that's John von Neumann at Princeton. So being not terribly bashful, I raised my hand, and I said, who is this person who's just come here? And he says, Jay Forrester.

And I smiled and poked my EE buddy, because we knew who Jay Forrester was. Jay Forrester had run the Whirlwind project at MIT. Jay Forrester was the inventor of the magnetic memory core. Jay Forrester was running Division 6 at Lincoln Laboratory, which was-- we knew that, because Forrester was a really famous, important MIT computer guy.

And I said, well, that's interesting. I wonder why in the world he wants to come to this place, a management school? Class finished. I had a break in my schedule. I went up to the fourth floor of the Sloan building to the dean's office and walked in and said, my name is Ed Roberts. I'm pretty sure I was a junior in electrical engineering. I understand that Jay Forrester has become a professor here. Could you tell me how I would find him?

And the person in the office said, sure, he's just four doors down the hall. And I said, okay, thank you very much. I walked down the hall. I walked into this office, JW Forrester on the door. There's a secretary there. I said is it possible that I could see Professor Forrester?

And she says, and who are you? I said, well, my name is Ed Roberts. I'm a junior at MIT. And what do you want to see him about? I said, I just would like to talk to him about what he's going to be doing here in the Management School at MIT. She says, well, let me see. She gets up, knocks on the door, opens up his office door, goes in, closes it behind.

She's in there for a couple of minutes. She comes out and says, Professor Forrester will see you. I said, oh, thank you. I walked in, Forrester is sitting behind this big desk and looks up at me. And he says, well, good morning. And I introduce myself, standing in front of his desk. He's sitting there looking up at me. What can I do for you?

I said, well, I'm really interested. Are you here to bring computers to the field of management? And he said in Forrester deep voice, well, no, not really. I'm really here to bring systems to management. Not having a clue as to what he meant, I said, oh, really, of course. And how are you going to be doing it? Well, it's to be seen what we're going to do. But I think we'll be doing some computer modeling work to bring a systems view of management issues.

And I nodded, totally blank as to what he really meant, but pretending to understand this. And he said, so, you are in Course 6? And I said, yes. And he said, what kind of courses are you taking? And I was busy thinking, what am I taking that relates to what this guy possibly could be interested in?

And I said, well, among other things, I'm taking the switching circuits. He says, from Sam Caldwell? And I said, well, yes, Professor Caldwell is my professor in switching circuits. And he says, he's a very good friend of mine. How are you doing in that course? And I said, well, I think I'm getting an A. He said, good. Good. Well, that's very interesting. Thank you for coming in.

And I said, being brash, I said, is it possible that I could come back and see you again next year when I'm in my senior year, and I'm going to have to be doing more thinking about career directions? And he said, certainly, I'd be glad to see you. So my introduction to Jay Forrester as a junior, without really having a clue as to what bringing systems to management was all about, turned out, in a way, to be really the turning point in my life.

And a year later, I came back, and I talked to him again. I had, in Course 6A, facing your senior year, a double assignment, back- to- back, two semesters in a row, just before you enter the full year of graduate school. And I was at General Electric, so I had two offers of jobs.

One was I could join the new GE Computer Division in Tucson, Arizona. And they agreed that they would fly me out there and back if I agreed to a double semester. That was a big deal that they would pay for the airfare. Or I could get a programming job in Small Aircraft Engine Division in Lynn.

Well, I already had a girlfriend, and I had all my student activities. And I really wanted desperately to stay in Lynn if I possibly could. By the way, the girlfriend is my wife of 52 years now. So it worked out.

And I said to Forrester that I'm really continuing to be interested in what you are doing. And I don't know when you're going to be hiring anybody, but perhaps there might be an opportunity for me to work in your group at some point. Would you give me any advice as to the kind of job I should take? And I described the two jobs.

He said, either job would be fine. They would both be good. But we're probably going to be doing some of our own computer software development, and it would be useful if you had programming skills. And I said, terrific. That was enough weaponry for me. I immediately went back to the 6A office, talked to Gene Boehne, who was the director of 6A, and said, Professor Forrester advises that I get this job in Lynn. And Boehne said, I'll take care of you, Ed.

And sure enough, I got my double assignment to be in Lynn, kept up all my activities, kept up my wife to be, maintained all of that. And then finished up that, did my graduate year in electrical engineering, finished my degree. By that time, Forrester was ready to move forward with System Dynamics. And he stubbornly insisted on hiring just graduate students from electrical engineering to join him. And he hired three of us.

So because, I think, of the prep work that I had done beginning in my junior year, I was one of the three fortunate graduate students in EE that Forrester selected. And beginning in the summer of 1958, I joined him as a full-time research assistant, and we started System Dynamics. Until then, he was working on his own. He was thinking about what it is he wanted to do. But except for writing one article in the Harvard Business Review, he hadn't really done anything to build a discipline or field and the like.

So we came in, and it was my first pioneering activity in a new field, the System Dynamics creation. In the beginning, it was Industrial Dynamics, and then we broadened our own perspective to not just industrial kinds of things. So that became a very important turning point in my life, because I was now working as a full-time research assistant for Forrester.

The terms and conditions of a full-time research assistant at MIT-- I think it's true throughout the Engineering School-- is that you can take two courses a semester free, and you get whatever the stipend is for a research assistant. So since I could take two courses, I could finish up all the credits I needed for my second Master's degree. And I finished that up very quickly. It took me a year. And I now had a Master's from Sloan as well as a Bachelor's and Master's from Electrical Engineering.

At that time, I seriously thought it was time to leave, because now I had a double education. I still thought I wanted to be an engineering manager. I now had new credentials in doing something very specific in bringing systems ideas from computers into management. And I thought about it, and then I decided that this was really an interesting thing that we were doing with System Dynamics and that maybe I should stay one more year. It would be a good investment of time just to help get this field further advanced before I went out looking for a job.

And that was my decision. I was going to stay one more year. Well, since I was going to stay one more year, I was still a full-time RA. I still had the right to take two courses a semester. So I didn't want to waste my time. I applied for the Economics Department PhD program. There was no PhD yet in the Sloan School, so I applied in Economics. I got accepted, and I started my PhD work in the Economics Department.

And once I started in the Economics Department, I opened up for myself a very different world. The quality of scholarship and academic excitement in the Economics Department, particularly in the Economics Department of Paul Samuelson and Bob Solow and the likes of who their colleagues were, was just dramatically exciting. And I think that in a very quick period of time, I fell in love with the exposure of academia. And after entry into the PhD program, I decided that I was interested in becoming a faculty member, not before.

And I'm quite sure that that is not like most people's lives. I think that most people who become professors have decided earlier on in their life that this is something they want to do. Not in my case. I decided after I was exposed to the excitement of such high-quality academics who were so stimulating in their attitudes.

I have, by the way, always felt obligated not just to Jay Forrester for what he did in System Dynamics but to Bob Solow. Bob Solow became the chair of my doctoral program. He was going to become the chair of my dissertation committee. And then he left MIT to join the Kennedy Council of Economic Advisers.

I went into total crisis when that happened. I went running into his office. I was sure that I was destroyed. And he told me to calm down and relax and that I ought to go see Frank Fisher, who was a new junior faculty member.

And Frank was an econometrician. I said, Frank will kill me. I can't do that kind of stuff. He says, stop being panicked. Go see Frank Fisher, and get out of my office.

And I went to see Fisher, and I ended up doing my dissertation with him very quickly. And I was done with my academic studies. Lots of other things happened in between, but that's my educational track through MIT.

INTERVIEWER: So I just want to follow up a little bit on your work in economics. Names like Samuelson and Solow, those are legendary names for people, not just at MIT, obviously, all over the world. You worked with them. You knew them at the height of their career. What was it like working with them? What were they like as people?

ROBERTS: Well, Samuelson taught the doctoral course in economic theory. And it was a required course, so all of the students in the class were PhD students. It was never a large department, so a class with Samuelson might have been 15 students. So you really were having a personal encounter with the man.

Samuelson seldom taught economic theory. He mostly taught the history of ideas. And whatever the topic was he was supposed to be lecturing on, he would end up spending 2/3 of the time talking about the background of the economist who had come up with this idea and that this guy came out of a poor family in Manchester, England, and his background-- and you were dealing not with learning something that was mathematical, which is what he was supposedly teaching. His attitude, I think, was you can learn that stuff on your own. What I'm going to tell you is I'm going to tell you what inspired that stuff.

And it was fascinating to sit with him when after Solow joined the Council of Economic Advisers, Samuelson remained fully at MIT but was an adviser to the council. He never took a position. Samuelson would go down for council meetings in Washington.

When Samuelson would go down to Washington, his doctoral assistant would teach our class. The doctoral assistant would come in and say, okay, now that Samuelson's gone, I can teach you this stuff on which you're going to be examined in the PhD general exams. And he would teach us all of the routine technical stuff. So Samuelson was an inspirer and was somebody who was laying a philosophical base for you to understand why you were interested in what was going on.

Solow, being Samuelson's student and close colleague all along, Solow was a workman. Solow did his stuff. Solow was the only person in the Economics Department that had a sense about technology. Solow got his Nobel Prize for developing a theory of economic growth and a model of economic growth that included technology as a contributing variable to economic growth.

Consequently, Solow was the guy who, both for his attitudes and his manner as well as for the substantive interest he had in technology, to whom I was most attracted, because it turns out what I wanted to do is I wanted to do my dissertation on applying System Dynamics to the field of research and development. By the way, Forrester said I shouldn't do it. Forrester said I should do something that was routine in production distribution systems, which everybody else was doing in System Dynamics. And I said, boring. And I wanted to do this.

Forrester said what I wanted to do was too hard and that I shouldn't try to do it. I went to see Solow. Solow encouraged me, because Solow liked technology, and he thought that trying to model technology at the level that I wanted to do it was intriguing and challenging. So I basically wrote my doctoral proposal. Solow quickly approved it.

Forrester was very reluctant, but it took me, I think, three more months to get Forrester to approve my dissertation proposal. But the Economics Department wouldn't allow Forrester to chair my committee. They would only allow somebody from the Economics Department to be chair of my committee. Forrester was a member of my committee. But Bob Solow, and then Frank Fisher as substitute, was that.

But I think that the environment then-- and I can only by imagination think that the same environment exists today-- was so stimulating and demanding. The most impressive course that I took in economics was the doctoral seminar, the PhD seminar. The PhD seminar was only for students who were at the point of a dissertation proposal.

And what you were going to do in the seminar is you were going to get up in class one day, you were going to present your proposal to your joint PhD students to hear, react, question, challenge, and the like. But the class was run by two faculty, Bob Solow and Frank Fisher in my year. The two faculty sat in chairs in opposite corners of the front of the room with the blackboard in the middle.

And the environment was crossfire, that you would be getting up in the middle, trying to present your ideas, your fellow doctoral students are out in front of you, and these two big guns are shooting the guns concurrently. And to me, it was really a bit like the debate experience I had had as an undergraduate but on a much more challenging level, because in debating, everybody is much more polite. You have your chance to present, and then somebody comes up to argue against you.

Here, the arguments were concurrent. And when the arguments were tough questions coming from the side, and you're looking this way, and then you're looking that way, you say, wow, this is really a storm of fire. And I think that what they did in the Economics Department was that they produced people who became accustomed to seeing ideas as things that deserved a storm of fire, and that ideas were fragile, and ideas were always in development stage, and ideas were something you had, but other people had perspectives on them and the like.

That kind of attitude of, in a way, projection and then counter with everybody around you was an absolutely stimulating set of challenges that I had not experienced as an undergraduate or graduate student in electrical or as a graduate student in Sloan. The environment then-- and I think less true today-- I think the environment then was much more learning from the front of the class to the back of the class, that the teaching was being done by professor to student.

And in the doctoral program in economics, that was not the feeling. The feeling was that the teaching was dramatically interactive, involving all of the doctoral students, involving professors in a collegial fashion. Now, collegial, but very challenging. There's no question who were the bosses. But they were there to fight around issues of ideas. And to me, that was an absolutely wonderful and inspiring situation.

And that's what caused me to change what I wanted to be in life. I went from thinking I wanted to be an engineering manager to suddenly knowing that I wanted to be a professor, and frankly, that I wanted to carry into the classroom what I thought I had learned-- not substantively-- what I had learned from a process point of view by my encounters in the Economics Department.

I must tell you that one of the most satisfying things I have done was a year ago, when they were raising funding for the Bob Solow Chair, the fact that I had an opportunity to contribute financially to creating a Robert Solow Chair was something that caused me to have great personal satisfaction. It was a small way of give back to somebody who had not just inspired me but who had taught me so much that I took with me for the rest of my life.

INTERVIEWER: So we'll be transitioning to the joining the faculty in just a moment. I'm curious if you could tell me just a little bit about System Dynamics and what you found appealing and powerful about that approach as a student and then sort of transitioning into your doctoral work and beyond.

ROBERTS: Right. So when we started System Dynamics-- and it really was we-- when we started it in the summer of '58, there wasn't a field. There was a point of view by Forrester. The point of view was very clear, but we couldn't understand what in the world it meant. The point of view was that all important kinds of things in the world are embedded in feedback systems and that what you really need to do to gain understanding of behavior and of what is going to be taking place over time and of how you could intervene to alter behavior is that you had to explicitly search out, describe, graphically display, and represent the underlying feedback system structure that explained the behavior.

Now, very importantly, there was no feedback systems work in the social sciences at that time, nothing in management, nothing in economics, nothing in humanities. You could find some article 100 years earlier where somebody had mentioned the feedback loop, but nobody was doing rigorous work to analyze complex problems or situations or economies from that point of view. So that's what we were going to do.

Forrester was very insistent that electrical engineering graduate students were the ones that he trusted most to do it. A couple of years later, when I became a junior faculty member, I would argue with him. And I would say, Jay, you can go to mechanical. You can go to chemical. Those guys have the same kinds of feedback systems training.

And he would say, no, no, electrical engineering is where it's at. Now, whether that was only his own view-- when he came to MIT, pre-World War II, he worked in the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory, servomechanisms is feedback systems. So Jay worked in what was the MIT pioneering laboratory of building feedback system oriented control devices. And inevitably, that was the basis for his mentality. And that's what we, as the diligent followers and builders of the faith, took on.

And it was not obvious. And the models we built were not obvious. But boy, we could build feedback systems models of anything under the sun. And we did. We had a whole bunch of graduate students on the fifth floor of the old Sloan building, which is where we were located. Forrester had a nice office on the fourth floor. The graduate students were on the fifth floor, out the back, looking at the parking lot.

And for fun, we would throw out a problem to ourselves and argue as to how we could go about representing this problem from a feedback systems point of view. And our attitude was that there wasn't any kind of problem we couldn't tackle. And no problem was more demanding than something that we could build a model for over the weekend.

And in a way, I think it's typical of MIT arrogant graduate students, and we certainly qualified. But we had a lot of fun, and we would be showing to ourselves how this notion could be applied to every kind of problem under the sun. I remember when one of the problems we decided to tackle was diabetes. Now, what in the world did diabetes have to do with the kinds of things going on in the Sloan School at that time? Answer, nothing, except to us. This would be a neat kind of thing to show students, that we can take the same kind of modeling approach and apply it to human dynamic systems.

And the system of blood sugar regulation with glucose and insulin and what have you is indeed a very good example of a feedback system. And we modeled it. And we could get our models to behave just the same way the diabetic processes worked in the human body. And we didn't regard it as a great invention. We regarded it as neat stuff for us to show our graduate students in our courses just as a way of indicating the power of the way of thinking about this.

Well, what happened is that within the System Dynamics Group-- and it was still the Industrial Dynamics Group for about four or five years before we changed our name-- within the group, we took on a series of sponsored projects. We had a project with Sprague Electric. We had a project with Minute Maid orange juice before they became a division of Coca-Cola. We had projects with Cummins Engine. And all of these were industrial projects, production, distribution, organization with inventories.

And in a way, it was the same kinds of problem sets that other people in the field of operations research and management science were tackling. And they were tackling it from their point of view. We were tackling it from a feedback systems point of view. Our models didn't look like their models. And we were looking for different kinds of understanding.

Well, gradually, we started reaching out to more complicated problems, to issues that were very different issues. When I mentioned earlier to you that I got into an argument with Forrester about my own doctoral dissertation, he wanted me to continue doing something like that. And by that time, by 1960 when I was picking a dissertation idea, I said continuing to do work like that was trivial and boring.

And I didn't want to do it. I wanted to do something new and different. And four semesters at General Electric and Co-Op and two degrees from MIT in electrical engineering caused me to feel comfortable with trying to model what went on in a technical environment. So I wanted to model engineering organizations and engineering projects. And Forrester said, it's too hard. You're not going to be able to finish your dissertation. And I said, I'll be totally bored if I do the other thing. This is what I want to do. And I did.

So my doctoral dissertation was The Dynamics of Research and Development. That became my first book. And it also became my entree to the second pioneering activity I engaged in at MIT, which was to get involved, from System Dynamics as my starting point, but as the target area of managing research, development and technical innovation. And there's no question I would not have got involved in it had I not been focusing my System Dynamics work on managing technology and R&D.

So that was our group. There was a fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was that Forrester was an engineer. And what that meant was that he didn't approach problems with the same acceptance of other academics and other scholars that most people in the management sciences field did. So Forrester's view was-- I remember once pointing out in a draft article.

I said, well, Jay, you should footnote such and such, and you should footnote such and such. And he said, no. Footnoting somebody means that I'm recommending that they read that person's work. And I said, no, footnoting somebody means that you're acknowledging that someone has done relevant work in the field. And he said, that may be your view of what it means. That's not what it means to me.

Well, his attitude was one that upset lots of other people. And consequently, from a brand new idea, which is what Industrial Dynamics was. It was a brand new idea where in the environment of the management sciences at the time in the early '60s, where it would have been, I believe, accepted as a bold new idea, instead, it became treated as a very controversial way of doing things, because, in fact, Forrester was very clear he didn't know about the other approaches, and he didn't respect all the other approaches.

So we ended up building an isolate field. And even today, which is now 50 years later, System Dynamics stands alone as a separated area. It is not integrated into management science departments or operations research centers at MIT or other places. It's a standalone practice.

And the people who do System Dynamics-- and those people exist all over the world-- they see themselves as very independent people. And they always can very clearly define what it is they do. And they aren't computer model builders. They are people bringing feedback systems points of view to attacking management, economic, social systems-- whatever it is that they're working on, they are bringing feedback systems to that field.

And in a way, it's a strength. But I think, more importantly, it's a weakness that we didn't have the advantage of being accepted as the kind of leadership thinking process that I believe we really were. And Forrester has received, belatedly, increasing amounts of credits and increasing numbers of professional society awards. But he's a man in his 90s at this stage. And from my perspective, it's a shame that he didn't have the same level of recognition and more 20 years earlier or sooner, because indeed, System Dynamics was really quite pioneering.

And I learned an awful lot from doing it. The long-lasting aspect of it, personally, is that I think differently. I can sit in a conversation with somebody, listening to them discussing life or their company, and I will hear from a feedback systems point of view. And I will be listening to ideas, and I will be looking for the cause and effect feedback loops that are explaining the ideas that someone is saying. And I think that all of the kinds of students that we trained well do the same thing. And to me, that's really a very powerful contributor.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me a bit about joining the faculty, making that transition, and how your interests involved from that point.

ROBERTS: Well, joining the faculty was a surprise. What happened was that in 1961, while I was already a doctoral student in economics but still principally doing System Dynamics work, in 1961, NASA was formed. And the head of NASA somehow decided that he wanted to have a relationship with MIT.

And he called Julie Stratton, who was president of MIT, met with him in Washington, and told him he wanted to create a relationship between NASA and MIT. Stratton called Howard Johnson, who at that time was dean of the Sloan School. Told Howard, go down and talk to this guy Webb and see what he really wants. And just remember, we don't do consulting for government agencies. If we relate, we do research.

Howard Johnson went down, told him that we would only consider a research relationship, that idea was welcomed, and in the summer of '61, a task force was appointed to the head of NASA. The task force consisted of the deputy dean of the Sloan School, who had been a Sloan Fellow from the Air Force and knew big systems; a major consultant, who was a senior lecturer in the Sloan School, who had been a McKinsey consultant on large organizations; Don Marquis, who had just come in to the Sloan School, who had been head of psychology at Yale and at Michigan, and therefore, had created lots of research centers; and me.

I was 25 years old. I was a doctoral student. I was a full-time instructor at the time. I'd been promoted, so I was a full-time instructor. But of the four of us, I was the only one who had any experience relating to engineering or R&D or anything to do with technology. The other three had never had any experience, nor was there anyone else in the Sloan School who worked on issues of technology or innovation in 1961.

So the kid, me, and these three very senior guys spent the summer touring NASA installations. We spent time in Washington. We spent time in Goddard Space Flight Center. We spent time at Huntsville, Alabama with the von Braun team. And in September, we put together a research proposal to NASA that said that we wanted to create a research center at MIT to look at the problems of large-scale technology management systems, especially those relating government and industry. That was our proposal.

We asked for an enormous amount of money. We asked for $550,000 for 18 months. This was September, 1961. The headquarters staff at NASA thought that the amount of money was outrageous and kept delaying acting on our proposal. In February of '62-- it took five months-- Webb finally got annoyed with his staff and said, I want to move forward. I'm signing off on this proposal.

And in February of '62, we started the first research center in any university in America in the area of management of technological innovation. And it was NASA's first money into MIT. And it was the first research center of any field in the Sloan School. So we really were doing all kinds of novel stuff.

By the way, two years later-- and this is important, because it comes to entrepreneurship-- two years later, NASA established the first aerospace research center in the country. That was in the Aeronautics Department. It wasn't yet Aeronautics and Aerospace. It was the Aeronautics Department at MIT. So we ended up with two NASA centers on campus at MIT.

But we started that, and beginning in February '62, I now was splitting my work. I was doing System Dynamics. I was, in fact, in charge of all System Dynamics education at the time. Jay Forrester didn't like teaching. He liked to do big ideas, but he didn't like teaching.

So I was in charge of all the teaching. We had lots of students. And I suddenly was trying to contribute to beginning a new area of work, which was organizational management of research and development and technological innovation. And that was a new, very important area of excitement.

But to get back to your question, at the end of the summer of '61, when we had just finished our task force, Howard Johnson called me and said, come on down, Ed. I want to talk to you. And I walked into his office, and he said, I hear all about the great work that's going on in your task force with NASA. It sounds like it's really terrific.

And I said, well, it's really interesting and exciting. He said, I want to tell you that we have decided to make you an assistant professor. And I said, what? He said, we're appointing you an assistant professor. I said, wow. That's astonishing. And that's amazing to me.

He said, well, why are you so amazed? You're finishing your dissertation. And I said, well, not so fast. I said, I'm finishing it, I hope. But it's going to be at least another year. And Howard Johnson looked at me. He said, it doesn't matter. You're doing really good and exciting work, and we are delighted to have you as a faculty member in the Sloan School.

When I was in Florida this week talking to the MIT Club of Naples, the guy who introduced me started to grill me in advance of the session. He said, I've looked at your CV. There's something very puzzling. I said, what is that? He said, you became a faculty member before you got your PhD. I said, that's very interesting. You have good eyesight. I said, that's precisely correct. I became a faculty member a year before I got my PhD.

So I started as a faculty member. But to me, it was really quite continuous. I wasn't doing anything new as an assistant professor, except I got a raise, and I had a new title. But what I had was I had the continuing work in System Dynamics and now the new work in research and development management. So that became my official entry into the world of academia at the assistant professor level.

Now, I think had I had any hesitation about what my career choice was going to be-- which I think by then, I didn't. I think I really had this feeling that I wanted to be a professor. That clearly just put the nails into it and said, okay, that's what you are. And that's what I started.

INTERVIEWER: So you were asked to join the faculty, I guess the term is ABD, All But Dissertation

ROBERTS: Right. It took one more year.

INTERVIEWER: Right. One more year. So tell me a little bit about those years after you became an assistant professor, how your research interests developed, whether your life changed, other than getting the salary bump.

ROBERTS: Yeah. I had already been married. I got married in 1959. Nancy finished her Bachelor's degree at BU, and one week later, we were married. It was characteristic of that time period. She was 21. I was 23. So she was teaching when I became an assistant professor.

She was teaching sixth grade in Sharon, which is where we lived. And we stayed there until she was pregnant with our second child. And then we moved to Newton, probably 1963, a couple of years into my assistant professorship.

So what I started to do is to follow a dual path, that I continued to do System Dynamics work. And I continued to have a number of research projects building out different kinds of System Dynamics models. We launched one of the earliest two-week summer programs at MIT. "We" clearly was really "we." Forrester wanted this to be done, but I ran them.