Inspirational Persons: The story of Amar Bose

Today, the audio technology space is highly competitive one with a lot of companies vying for space. Irrespective of the competition there has been one company which has always stood the test and been a prominent name – BOSE. What’s special is the founder of BOSE corporation is an Indian American Amar Bose hailing from Kolkata and was a student at MIT in the United States. Amar was born to an Indian Freedom fighter in Bengal. He remained a professor at MIT until 2001.

Amar Bose did his electrical engineering from MIT and later had successfully filed patents on loud speaker design which was later used in Bose Corporation.  In the 1980s, Bose developed an electromagnetic replacement for automotive shock absorbers. This technical breakthrough enables radically improved performance of automotive suspension systems. Bose went onto become a Forbes Billionaire ranking 217 in the riches list in 2009. But money was never his primary motive to come into the business that is why he never went public to raise money for his company. In Bose’s own words  “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”

Amar Bose died on July 12, 2013, he earned the Baker Teaching Award in 1963-64, and many other teaching awards over the years. In 2011, Bose donated a majority of the company’s non-voting shares to MIT on the condition that the shares never be sold and those shares in the company would raise money for MIT’s research projects.

Innovation and Research eventually pay off for the society by creating quality jobs for many as evident in Bose Corporation.