Papakonstantinou and Rubalcava founded HEAT because they thought that Harvard needed to encourage entrepreneurship more.
"We will be confidential. We're not going to try to make money off of this. Our ultimate goal is for start-ups to outgrow our services," Rubalcava said. Rubalcava noted that great businesses have been conceived at colleges, including Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo.
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"We won't reject ideas. We will tell them the challenges. We're here to help people, not discourage them," said Rubalcava.
Rubalcava expects that students will approach HEAT with many ideas in hot technological fields such as optics and network communication, and in Internet communications.
HEAT will use space in Pierce Hall north of the Science Center.