Creating to Help Others
By Sarah Foote
Reprinted courtesy of News@MITSloan
March 16, 2005
Mira Sahney, LFM '05, has always enjoyed creating and building things that help other people. She came to MIT Sloan to pursue her goal of one day starting her own company that will make medical devices to assist others. Mira first heard about the Leaders for Manufacturing Fellowship Program (LFM) from a group of alums who worked with her husband (Howard Tang, MBA '06) at Boeing. The alums had such wonderful things to say about the LFM program, Mira knew that the combination of an engineering and a business degree from MIT Sloan would help put her on the right path to her goal.
Mira and her husband, Howard Tang, at the top of Mt. Elbert in Colorado
After graduating from the University of Michigan and Stanford University with degrees in mechanical engineering, B.S.E. and M.S.M.E. respectively, Mira began work as a research engineer at Flow International Corporation, a company that makes machines for other companies such as Boeing. Mira soon found herself working on high pressure machines—one that uses cold pasteurization to preserve highly perishable food, and the other that uses high pressure water to cut objects. Mira began to research ways to make the equipment more efficient for the company's customers. While conducting her research Mira found a way to make the machine cut 400 percent faster than before. In turn this saves the customer a lot of time and money. To this day, Flow International is still using her ideas and has developed a product platform around her breakthrough innovation.
In her first year at MIT Sloan, Mira quickly became involved with many activities-- playing intramural softball, joining the ski team and even learning how to play hockey so she could join MIT Sloan's hockey club. Intrigued with medical devices from the many engineering courses she took as an undergraduate, Mira became involved with the $50K competition and joined a team called Active Joint Brace. The company produces a brace that stroke and spinal cord injury patients wear, like clothing or glasses, to help restore their mobility. The brace assists patients by helping them regain movement, and gives them power that they normally wouldn't have.
The two engineers that she worked with on the project had entered the $50K competition before but had not made it past the semi-finals in previous years. Acting as a Product Manager, Mira helped write a business plan for the company, while also assisting with marketing and business strategy. "They had the technology down-pat, and they had proven [that the brace worked] to the medical community and just needed help with the business side of the product. ‘How are you going to make money?' ‘How do the economics of this thing work?' ‘Who's your customer and who is going to buy it?' That's where I was involved," says Mira.
Active Joint Brace ( www.myomo.com ) won the competition last year and the group is going forward as a company. Mira plans to stay in the Boston area and continue to work for the company after she graduates from MIT Sloan in June. She says the company has already received "lots of positive feedback" about the product, and will continue to work with several local hospitals including Spaulding, Boston University Medical Center , and Massachusetts General Hospital to use and test the product. The company is also in the approval process with the MIT hospital to test the brace with outpatients. "We are working with a lot of patients in the area, so we want to stay here," says Mira of the company. Adding, "It's really exciting. We recently started working with stroke patients. Before we were working with only spinal cord injury patients, and there are a lot more stroke patients out there. We're getting a lot of great feedback. It's been really positive—the things that people can do with the brace. Patients can see improvement in the short term and that's really exciting." The company gained national exposure with a 30 second news spot on Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science , which has garnered interest from places as far away as Utah . "People are really getting excited about the product. It's just great to have people so excited about something you're working on," she notes.
Back to Basics
As part of their degree requirements, LFM students participate in a seven month internship. At her internship at Agilent Technologies in Colorado Springs, CO, Mira found that many of her MIT Sloan classes were extremely useful-- especially OP and Managerial Accounting. At Agilent, Mira worked in global supply engineering, and was asked to analyze the Process Centers to see if the company could improve operations to make them more efficient. Mira began by looking at the company's supply chain, and then worked with both management and engineers to see what they thought the most crucial problem was. Mira learned that on time delivery to their customers was a large problem, but she knew the problem wasn't isolated to just that and took time to look at the entire supply chain process.
"I looked at the problem, defined it, and then mapped out solutions. What we implemented was a whole menu of operational building blocks to help Agilent. A lot of people had only understood their specific area, so it was valuable to map it out for everyone. It was good to get everyone on the same page," says Mira. The company had also suffered some losses through lay-offs and some knowledge and expertise left with those people. Her recommendation -- go back to the basics. "It was textbook. Let's take a simple case and go through the product line and see what we should do," she says of recommendations she gave the company.
Mira's recommendations proved to be so valuable that they became part of a pilot implementation. While testing her ideas, Mira found a huge bug in the new computer system the company had recently purchased. If not for her ideas, they may not have otherwise discovered the bug for some time. It took nearly two months to fix, so Mira developed a work-around while the computer company worked on the bug. Even though she is back at school, her project was built into Agilent's fiscal 2005 budget, which makes it an official company project. "I learned a lot. I got to work with really smart people. You had to show them the math and explain the project to them. They wouldn't just trust you, and they weren't going to take your word for it. So it took a little longer to get the ball rolling but once you did, you had all these people behind you, supporting you. It was an enjoyable experience," she says of the internship.
All in the Family
Now back on campus, Mira is working on her thesis and this semester is able to take one of her classes with her husband Howard. (Mira's first-year experience at MIT Sloan was so positive that Howard applied to the MBA program "after seeing how much fun she was having.") They're in Finance II together, and are even on the same team. "It's great," says Mira of attending MIT Sloan together at the same time, noting, "I get to meet the first-year class too." Mira's brother, Vik Sahney, also joined her at MIT Sloan as a member of the LFM Class of 2005. When Mira heard such great things about LFM she told Vik. At the time he was working for Ford and pursued alums there to speak with about business school and the LFM program. He too heard only great things about the LFM program and was sold.
With her two years at MIT Sloan almost over, Mira has only great things to say about the school and the LFM program, which she describes as "wonderful." "I came to MIT Sloan to switch from industrial entrepreneurship to consumer and medical. I just think it's great to be behind a greater vision than just making a CEO rich. It's good to have a greater cause, a greater mission. I knew going back to business school would give me the bigger picture to shift into that area. And, I think it really has," says Mira. Noting, "It's opened a lot of doors. The program has exceeded my expectations. I've gotten everything out of it that I thought I would. And more."