Does anyone know what MIT wants out of the funds it invests? Also, what rights does its faculty have on their inventions? Same question for entrepreneurs who work with MIT?
From what little I can read, The Engine is a separate entity from MIT, which gives them freedom to work with entrepreneurs without the restrictions in faculty contracts.
Some technologies invented at MIT(1) will be licensed by companies(2) that will leverage The Engine(3) to accelerate their development, with the expectation that the development will take place over a longer-than-usual time scale (10-20 years).
Maybe I'm optimistic, but I'm guessing that this is less about the return on the money for MIT, and more about bringing impactful technologies to market that previously have not fit well in the existing funding ecosystem (and inspiring others to do the same).
Yes, MIT does this quite explicitly, which while making some professors unhappy, has helped it avoid some notorious messes seen at other universities when they got greedy, e.g. the University of Pennsylvania going from #1 in computers (ENIAC) to nothing, or CalTech losing Steve Wolfram over his first symbolic math program.
Flip sides include giving professors 1 day a week to work on whatever they want that's not part of their MIT stuff.
Trivia: after decades of being one of the worst in the nation, averaging about one license per year (seriously, and we know of three of them, Symbolics, LMI, and Macsyma to the former), and infamously flubbing both 3D core memory and synthetic/semi-synthetic penicillin licencing, MIT realized they had a problem and supposedly fixed it, the official statement was wonderfully understated, said something about actually licencing the technology instead of focusing on the process of licensing....
"The Engine will demand less equity in startups than is typical, allowing founders to maintain more control over their companies."