Globe reporter Janelle Nanos sits down with leaders in the city’s business community to talk about their career paths, work and accomplishments, as well as their vision for Boston’s future.
When Emily Knight first completed her studies at Cornell University, she envisioned a career in hospitality. Today, as the president of The Engine Accelerator, a “tough tech” incubator in Kendall Square, she plays host to something even more ambitious: Breakthrough businesses working on world-changing ideas like commercial fusion and solutions to climate change.
The Engine first emerged out of MIT in 2016 as a venture capital endeavor helping the university’s lab-born startups commercialize their products. At the time, the term “tough tech” was a bit of a double entendre: The companies were solving hard problems, but they were also incredibly hard to get off the ground because they were capital intensive and had costly equipment needs.
Tough tech means “you’re taking an approach to solving the world’s biggest problems with a physical engineering component,” Knight explained. “There were so many wonderful technologies being born at MIT, but they weren’t getting to the market to solve the problem that they were intended to.”
Knight joined The Engine in 2017 as a fixer of sorts, negotiating with local institutions to help the startups get shared access to their equipment. “We created this sort of a ZipCar or Airbnb for equipment and lab space,” she said, and eventually, that led to an “ecosystem of support and resources. The physical facility is one of them.”
The Engine opened its new, massive four-story facility in 2022 at 750 Main Street in Kendall Square. Last year, it spun out The Engine Accelerator from the venture effort and put Knight at the helm. Now she ushers companies from their earliest stages into full-fledged operations. A startup at The Engine can evolve throughout the building, getting access to more resources as it grows.
“They just don’t need office space, because they can kind of find that anywhere, but they need lab space, they need chemistry fume hoods, they need flow cytometers, they need microscopes. So where we are today was sort of born out of those early needs,” Knight said. And she’s there to help them even beyond The Engine’s walls. When a company is ready for its own space, she works with them to find a location that works.
In her seven years helping to power The Engine, she’s also worked to foster a community “where you can find like-minded people doing really hard things and connect with them,” Knight said. Some days, that means she’s helping founders who are working on decarbonizing cement production; other days she’s assisting those working on lithium extraction or building renewable energy grids.
Playing host to all those big ideas keeps her on her toes, but it’s also part of what makes Boston’s innovation landscape so unique, Knight says. When they learn about her hospitality background, “people often ask me if we’ll ever open up a hotel at The Engine,” Knight said. “I tell them I think I just did.”
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