MIT Media Lab receives huge funding for banking research

The MIT Media Lab announced the creation of the Center for Future Banking. Bank of America will be providing $3-5 million dollars in annual funding in a joint collaboration with the media lab.

"We are bringing together the creative, multidisciplinary research of Media Lab faculty and students with the real-world business experience and deep-domain knowledge of our Bank of America colleagues-all in a highly innovative environment that promotes unconventional thinking and risk-taking. In doing so, we hope not only to discover the principles that will transform banking in the next decade, but also to advance our basic understanding of the rapidly changing relationship between people, technology, and society in the twenty-first century.", says Frank Moss, Director of the Media Lab.

Xconomy follows up in their article:

Professor Deb Roy, Chair of MIT's academic program in Media Arts and Sciences, will serve as the Center's Founding Director and Principal Investigator.

The Center for Future Banking will attempt to strike that balance, according to Moss and Roy. It will do that by engaging to some extent in varieties of “directed research” that Media Lab scientists managed to sidestep for many years.

In general, Roy says, the center’s work will fall into two categories: rethinking the banking experience and understanding and leveraging insights into consumers’ banking behavior.

Moss, in describing the new arrangement, is careful to emphasize that the Media Lab isn’t selling out. “It is partly [going to be] directed research—but you’ve got to be careful to distinguish ‘directed’ from ’secret,’” he says. “We are not going back on our openness. But it is partly collaboratively directed by the bank. There will be certain structures we have to allow the bank to have a voice in what kinds of problems we look at. But the faculty will maintain 100 percent authority over what kinds of students they bring and what kinds of research they are publishing.”

The MIT Media Lab was co-founded by Nicholas Negroponte. In 2000, he stepped down from the organization as the lab was losing major funding after the dot-com crash.