Had you met Helen Greiner when she was a student at MIT in the late 1980s, you might not have pegged her as the future head of a consumer and military products company. She was quiet, a bit shy, and, as even she would agree, something of a nerd. But she shares a key trait with many successful business leaders -- a passion for something. In her case, it happens to be robots.
That passion led Greiner -- along with Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks -- to found what would become iRobot in 1990. Over the past four years, iRobot has sold more than 1.5 million robots for cleaning people's floors and has deployed more than 300 tactical military robots in Iraq. The company completed its initial public offering on November 15, 2005.
Greiner recently gave a presentation at Wharton sponsored by the School's entrepreneurship and technology clubs, after which she sat down with Knowledge@Wharton to talk about her fascination with robots and what impact robots have, and will have, on our everyday lives.
An edited version of that interview follows. Excerpts from the interview are available as a Knowledge@Wharton audio podcast and can be downloaded from Apple's iTunes.
Knowledge@Wharton: How did you first become interested in robots?
Greiner: I saw Star Wars when I was 11 -- in the theater -- and I was enthralled by R2D2 because he was more than a machine. He was a character, he had a personality, and he was really one of the stars of the show.
Knowledge@Wharton: Is it true that, at the time, you didn't know that R2D2 was played by an actor in a costume?
Greiner: Yes. My big brother told me that Kenny Baker actually played R2D2, and that burst my bubble a slight amount. But, at the time, I was hacking on a computer, a [Radio Shack] TRS-80 that my parents had bought for the family.
[continue]
Page 1 of 14
> >>