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JAMMING MAN
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He has no qualms about reading a book, visiting an art gallery, or even going to a movie during what less open-minded people would call "working hours."

     "I was like a little astronaut," he recalls. "I'd go out every day into the American world and then come home at night to this very different world, and it was up to me to make the connections between the two." At the time it was subconscious, a necessity. Today he appreciates the creative effort that allowed him to make those connections. That early experience taught him the habit of always working each new experience into his pre-existing experiences rather than to reject it.
     At the age of nine Kao started a literary magazine at his school "because the school didn't have one." He got the principal to let him use the P.A. system, put together an editorial board, organized a schoolwide contest and launched the Hillside Grade School Inkwell.
     "Nobody told me how to do this," he says. "I just kind of figured out that it was more fun being in the principal's office, organizing a contest, than it was learning whatever I was supposed to be learning in fourth grade. And that's pretty much been par for the course all the way through."
     At Yale Kao double-majored in philosophy and behavioral science. He then entered medical school, in no small part because his father was an M.D.-Ph.D. and John was his only son. It was to be expected. But he managed to do it in a way that jibed with his own interests.
     "My modus operandi," Kao explains, "was not to go head to head with my parents but to adapt what they had in mind to what I had in mind, so that the result would be a kind of amalgam of both." In this case, the amalgam was Jungian psychoanalysis, the study of which would satisfy his parents' wish that he get an M.D. and his own interest in human behavior.
     Kao loved medical school, but he realized toward the end of his residency at Harvard that he wasn't interested in the kinds of jobs to which his education was leading him. For him, medical school was a path of knowledge, not a career choice. So he worked out a deal with Harvard allowing him to enroll in the business school while he was still finishing up his residency in psychiatry. At the time he had a vague idea of using his psychiatric training to help companies or CEOs, or "people who were developing new things." He also had an interest in producing movies, and he thought the business knowledge, combined with the knowledge he already had of consumer psychology, would give him the edge he needed there.
     Kao received his MBA in the spring of 1982 and started teaching at Harvard two weeks later. Within two years he had carved out his niche as "the creativity person" on the faculty. It was a remarkably fast rise in a notoriously staid and traditional institution. But Kao was never one to rest on his laurels. After teaching creativity for a couple of years, he decided it was time to go into the actual business of creating.
     "I realized it was a good opportunity to incubate ventures," he recalls. "And that I could not only think about them, but I could actually do them."
     In 1986 Kao happened upon some interesting work being done by Howard Green, a professor at the Harvard Medical School who was growing sheets of skin for burn victims. Kao immediately saw the potential for bio-tech factories manufacturing not just skin but cartilage and other kinds of human tissue for every kind of replacement procedure.

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