The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices

If you've ever read a book on an e-reader, unleashed your inner rock star playing Guitar Hero, built a robot with LEGO Mindstorms, or ridden in a vehicle with child-safe air bags, then you've experienced first hand just a few of the astounding innovations that have come out of the Media Lab over the past 25 years. But that’s old hat for today’s researchers, who are creating technologies that will have a much deeper impact on the quality of people’s lives over the next quarter century.

In this exhilarating tour of the Media Lab's inner sanctums, we'll meet the professors and their students - the Sorcerers and their Apprentices - and witness first hand the creative magic behind inventions such as:

* Nexi, a mobile humanoid robot with such sophisticated social skills she can serve as a helpful and understanding companion for the sick and elderly.

* CityCar, a foldable, stackable, electric vehicle of the future that will redefine personal transportation in cities and revolutionize urban life.

* Sixth Sense, a compact wearable device that transforms any surface – wall, tabletop or even your hand - into a touch screen computer.

* PowerFoot, a lifelike robotic prosthesis that enables amputees to walk as naturally as if it were a real biological limb.

Through inspiring stories of people who are using Media Lab innovations to confront personal challenges - like a man with cerebral palsy who is unable to hum a tune or pick up an instrument yet is using an ingenious music composition system to unleash his “inner Mozart”, and a woman with a rare life-threatening condition who co-invented a revolutionary web service that enables patients to participate in the search for their own cures - we’ll see how the Media Lab is empowering us all with the tools to take control of our health, wealth, and happiness.

Along the way, Moss reveals the highly unorthodox approach to creativity and invention that makes all this possible, explaining how the Media Lab cultivates an open and boundary-less environment where researchers from a broad array of disciplines – from musicians to neuroscientists to visual artists to computer engineers - have the freedom to follow their passions and take bold risks unthinkable elsewhere.

The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices can serve as a blueprint for how to fix our broken innovation ecosystem and bring about the kind of radical change required to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It is a must-read for anyone striving to be more innovative as an individual, as a businessperson, or as a member of society.

Frank Moss had a childhood dream to be a part of America's space program. But by the time he graduated from MIT with a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1976, funding for the space program had been dramatically slashed. So he went to work in the computer industry instead, as a researcher at IBM. But he soon left to try his hand in the world of high tech startups. After three companies he found success as CEO of Tivoli Systems, which he took public in 1995 and merged with IBM a year later. After making sure the merger was a success, he went back to starting high tech companies, but this time he realized that he was looking for something much different: he wanted to make a bigger contribution to humanity. This led him to co-found the cancer drug discovery company Infinity Pharmaceuticals in 2001 and then to the directorship of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011. While there he wrote his first book, "The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices", about the lab's highly unorthodox approach to innovation. He is now back, once again, to the world of entrepreneurship as co-founder of Bluefin Labs, Inc.