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Friday, December 12, 2008
The Mover
Chris Noble trades oil rigs for MIT's renewable energy licensing
By By Amy Castor, Special to Mass High Tech
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Chris Noble’s career got off to a dirty start. Thirty years ago, he worked on offshore oil rigs, where he saw the black gold shoot out of the ground. Not the sort of background you’d expect from someone focused on bringing clean technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace.
But it partly explains why Noble calls his new role as MIT’s technology licensing officer for clean and renewable energy a “dream job.” This is actually his fourth career, and it combines aspects of his three previous ones.
The son of a French mother and Canadian father, Noble grew up in Montreal in a bilingual family. He got a degree in electrical engineering thinking it would lead to travel and adventure, which it did.
He wound up working four years in rural South America for Schlumberger Ltd., a company that hires electrical engineers and puts them to work on oil rigs. “I was acquiring down-hole data using electronic instruments and processing the information on computers,” he said.
Interestingly, it gave him a crystal ball to see into the future of microprocessors. “We used some absolutely bleeding-edge technology, because cost is no object when you’re drilling for oil. And I could see that all of this stuff was going to end up in consumer electronics one day,” he said.
So he headed for Boston, where he got an MBA at MIT, married a classmate and landed a marketing position with Analog Devices Inc., a company whose products had been used in the down-hole equipment on the rigs.
He stayed 12 years before his interests shifted and he wanted to get some merger-and-acquisitions experience. That’s when Clare Inc. — a company that had recently gone public and was looking to buy other companies — offered him a position in helping establish joint ventures.
Two years later, he caught the startup bug and helped Philsar Semiconductor Inc., a company developing chips for a brand-new standard called Bluetooth, raise capital. When the firm moved to Ottawa, Noble opted for career No. 3, hanging out his own shingle as InflectionPoint Consulting.
“I decided to become a consultant and free agent raising money for startups,” he said. “I enjoyed working for the little companies and my kids were at an age where I wanted to watch their soccer games.”
Six years later, Noble figured he had time for one more career. He envisioned something in nonprofit focused on global warming. The MIT job, which involves identifying companies that can benefit from clean technology coming out of the university, was a perfect fit.
After seeing how much oil gets pumped out of the planet, “it’s great to be involved in an effort to change that to a completely different set of energies,” he remarked.
Amy Castor is a freelance writer in Amherst.
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