2026 MIT Japan Conference

As early as the 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese firms revealed a striking competitive paradox. Their best wasn’t succeeding by making “the right tradeoffs” among quality, cost, features, and speed. Instead, they were delivering products of higher quality, with more variety, at lower cost, and at faster speed—while appearing to exert less effort. It was as if they were playing an entirely different game.

Close study revealed “the secret.” While much of the industrial world focused on optimizing the flow of materials through machines with fancy math, with people as an afterthought, the best created conditions in which people could solve hard problems, develop outstanding solutions, and deliver exceptional value to society. Everyone else was competing on brawn power; they were winning on brain power.

Amidst today’s turbulence—political realignments, economic disruptions, and rapid technological change—this approach to sustaining competitive advantage—seeing and solving problems better and faster than anyone else—is even more vital.

This talk explores how the best do this, by making problem solving easier to do, problems easier to solve, and problems easier to see earlier and more often, before they grow big. Examples will include both historical lessons from the pioneers and contemporary applications of these same principles.

Nucleic acids are conventionally known as molecular carriers of genetic information, the blueprint for life. Alternatively, nucleic acids can be used to fabricate complex 2D and 3D molecular assemblies with unprecedented nanometer-scale precision that replicates, and goes beyond, highly evolved naturally biological assemblies. In this talk, I will illustrate how we have used DNA-based virus-like particles (DVLPs) to elicit a potent immunological response that surpasses a clinical protein-based equivalent VLP due to the inert, immunologically silent nature of DNA. I will discuss how this next-generation DVLP platform opens up numerous possibilities in active immunotherapies for challenging infectious diseases as well as central nervous system disorders. Next, I will demonstrate how programmable DNA sequences can be used to encode complex “wet” databases of information, akin to a Google Books search engine for molecules. I will apply this database system to storing human and viral genomes at room temperature, bypassing the need for cold-chain logistics that currently limit global genomics to a very small fraction of the globe and global population. Finally, I will illustrate how lithographic semiconductor patterning can be used to interface organics with inorganics by using DNA to pattern single quantum emitters with nanometer-scale precision on chip-scale silicon wafers for quantum applications. I will highlight translational stories from these areas as our inventions at MIT transform into industrial innovations through start-ups cofounded by Bathe and lab members to impact the US and global economies.

Infrared photons, though invisible to the human eye, are rapidly moving to the forefront of technology, enabling breakthroughs in how we sense, measure, and see the world. In my group, we are developing chip-scale photonic technologies that render the invisible visible, turning tiny chips into powerful tools for sensing and imaging.

On the sensing front, we are creating low-cost, high-performance photonic chips that harness a wide range of optical signatures in the infrared, including Raman scattering, absorption, and refractive index perturbations. These platforms bring laboratory-grade spectroscopy into compact and robust form factors, enabling real-time detection of trace chemicals across diverse industries. Several of these technologies have already moved beyond the laboratory: InSpek is advancing process control in pharmaceutical and agri-food sectors, Lightfinder Inc. is enabling continuous monitoring in energy and chemical industries, and other platforms are addressing urgent challenges such as the detection of heavy metal contamination in water.

In parallel, we are reshaping imaging optics at the chip scale. By transforming chips into flat optical elements, we can achieve performance once thought impossible with conventional lenses. A salient example is our flat fisheye lens, now commercialized by 2Pi Inc., which provides panoramic imaging in a wafer-thin form factor. Building on this foundation, we are extending the concept further, creating optical components that conform seamlessly to curved surfaces and developing active elements that reconfigure their functions on demand through tunable materials.

Together, these advances chart a vision where invisible photons become an accessible and ubiquitous resource. From real-time chemical monitoring to adaptive infrared imaging, chip-scale photonics offers a new sensory frontier — one that blends fundamental science with tangible societal impact.

This presentation distills lessons from my book manuscript The First Week, which is to be completed in the next 12 months. The book focuses on a very unusual innovation: the seven-day week. The week isn't usually thought of as akin to a market or technology platform, but it-- like the calendar-- is indeed a temporal platform-- a way of organizing time that allows and encourages dedicated "applications" (i.e., activities and routines) to be "written" (i.e., scheduled) on it. Also, while we don't usually think of the week as an innovation, it in fact has the hallmarks of an especially difficult innovation: It was invented just once and spread in a way that is distinctive of innovations that must be experienced by a critical mass in society before they are adopted. Thus, even though week-observing communities arrived in China starting in the 8th century, it was only in the mid-19th century (beginning with the treaty ports in Japan) that the week began to be adopted in East Asia. Some of the lessons relevant to managers who want their innovations to get widely adopted are as follows: a) How important it is that early adopters be mobile, in that they take the innovation to new contexts where it might get more traction; b) How important it is that the minority of early-adopters be highly committed so as to reach a critical mass; c) How it can sometimes be unimportant that the innovation solves critical problems for the majority, just as long as it is sufficiently beneficial to adjust to the minority; d) How quickly an innovation that was long uninteresting can come to be taken for granted and naturalized; and e) The importance of platform thinking in non-technological domains. 

Generative AI is reshaping many industries by offering innovative approaches to creating content. While LLM and VLM tools like ChatGPT have proven effective in multimedia, their application in engineering faces unique challenges, such as maintaining precision under varying requirements. This talk will explore some of these challenges, with an emphasis on achieving designs that are innovative, feasible, and achieve high functional performance. We will examine case studies across various engineering disciplines, such as kinematic design and topology optimization. Furthermore, we will explore how precision-focused generative AI can transcend mere mimicking of statistical patterns to address performance, constraints, and innovation in engineering. The talk will show examples of AI-driven design co-pilots for engineering tasks, along with covering methods that effectively combine multimodal generative models with engineering optimization and tools, highlighting how this fusion augments the design process. The presentation will conclude by highlighting the broader impact of generative AI in facilitating design democratization and fostering rapid innovation across the engineering sector.

Flapping-wing flight at the insect scale is incredibly challenging. Insect muscles not only power flight but also absorb in-flight collisional impact, making these tiny flyers simultaneously agile and robust. In contrast, existing aerial robots have not demonstrated these properties. Rigid robots are fragile against collisions, while soft-driven systems suffer from limited speed, precision, and controllability. In this talk, I will describe our effort in developing a new class of bio-inspired micro-flyers, ones that are powered by high bandwidth soft actuators and equipped with rigid appendages. We constructed the first heavier-than-air aerial robot powered by soft artificial muscles, which can demonstrate a 1000-second hovering flight. In addition, our robot can recover from in-flight collisions and perform somersaults within 0.10 seconds. This work demonstrates for the first time that soft aerial robots can achieve agile and robust flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered micro-aerial vehicles, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots. I will also discuss our recent progress in incorporating onboard sensors, electronics, and batteries.