If you removed Willie Wonka from his chocolate factory, planted him on the Harvard campus, and gave him an ever-present five o’clock shadow, you’d be only part of the way to getting David Edwards. Edwards may be the most entrepreneurial member of the Harvard faculty, with start-ups developing drugs for cystic fibrosis, selling a novel kind of energy shot, and perfecting food packaging that you can eat. (Think grapes filled with gazpacho.)

He splits his time between Paris and Boston, and in 2007 opened up Le Laboratoire, a new kind of collaboration space and gallery in Paris that blends science, art, and commerce. A Cambridge version, The Lab Cambridge, is in the works for 2014.