300 geniuses call him boss

Moss wants to more strongly focus the Media Lab on confronting "some of the looming social problems we have today," including the healthcare challenges of an aging population.

He sees more healthcare being delivered in the home ("health without hospitals") through technologies such as the ability to "project a physical presence" to a remote location by manipulating a proxy robot. If Moss could project his own physical presence to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, to look in on his aging father "and do basic things for him, that'd be a wonderful thing," he says. "I think that physical projection may be as commonplace 20 years from today as digital projection is today."

The lab is also keeping close ties to the "One Laptop Per Child" project to develop a $100 computer, with electric power supplied by a hand crank. Mr. Negroponte left his post as chairman of the Media Lab to spin off the project and pursue it full time. Moss wonders what new directions education will head in when 100 million children in the developing world begin to learn via computer and even create their own programs. He calls this untapped resource a "brain gain."

Moss is trying to balance the worlds of business and academia. Companies want new products, while researchers often want to explore intriguing new possibilities unfettered by their commercial prospects. "It's a compromise." Moss says. He wants to see "a change in behavior" in the 30 faculty and hundreds of grad students at the lab that tilts them even more toward helping sponsors understand how the technologies they're seeing demonstrated apply to companies, he says.

While there has been widespread appreciation of the Media Lab, Moss concedes that he's found few people who identify the lab with a specific new technology. "The Media Lab has succeeded beyond its wildest expectations, in terms of graduating real clever entrepreneurial [students]," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's been, I suspect, less of a success in terms of delivering products out of the lab that companies can actually use."

To remedy that, Moss plans to more often go beyond demonstrating concepts to building working prototypes. He'd like to see the lab making "a very concrete contribution ... where you say 'the Media Lab did A, B, or C.' "

On the other hand, sponsors have told Moss the reason they're backing the lab is to get "the long view. They don't want me to change that."

But that "long view" may be getting shorter and shorter. "Who could have imagined [the impact of] Google even five years ago?" he says. Not long ago, the idea of widespread instant access to every Web page on the planet "was a 50-year vision. It actually turned out to be a two- or three-year vision."

As Moss and others see it, more innovation is going to bubble up from the users of technology themselves. Does that mean that labs such as his could become obsolete?

Maybe, but "So what if we aren't here in 20 years, but we led to a whole new way of doing things?" Moss says. "We probably wouldn't be here anyway. So let's be part of it.

"I don't think that this massive sea change in how innovation is done is not going to happen if the Media Lab denies it. So I'd rather get behind it and help our sponsors understand how their businesses change when creativity comes from the bottom up."

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