Featured Publications

This list is a guide to MIT ILP research surveys on topics that have been of interest to ILP member companies. The list includes research surveys from 2016 to present and is updated regularly.

Survey of MIT research:

Atmospheric chemistry/science * agriculture/food/water * carbon capture * climate modeling/simulation * health * materials * oceans * policy/economics * weather/precipitation/storms * startups...




Please note that the ILP RESEARCH SURVEY LIST serves as a guide to MIT research on topics that have been of interest to ILP member companies and that the older the survey is, the more likely that it will contain some inactive projects.

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.


About the Author:
Hal Gregersen is the Executive Director of the Leadership Center as MIT, a prolific author and motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s fifty most innovative minds. He has authored or coauthored ten books, and his most recent bestselling book is The Innovator’s DNA, coauthored with Jeff Dyer and Clayton Christensen.

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds—the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies.

The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses.


About the Authors:
Michael Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in the MIT School of Engineering. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books, including the classic bestseller Microsoft Secrets and Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World.

Annabelle Gawer is the Professor and Chair in Digital Economy at the University of Surrey and Co-Director of CoDE, the Surrey Centre for Digital Economy in the UK. She is the author of two books Platform Leadership (with Cusumano), and Platform, Markets and Innovation.

David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School and is the longest-serving member of the Intel board of directors. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of nine books and has written extensively for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business Review.

Survey of MIT research including such topics as:


Supply chains * logistics * optimization * transportation systems * blockchain * IoT, RFID * strategy * analytics, data * sustainability * risk, security....



Please note that the ILP RESEARCH SURVEY LIST serves as a guide to MIT research on topics that have been of interest to ILP member companies and that the older the survey is, the more likely that it will contain some inactive projects.