Innovation in a Time of Change
Symposium Recordings:
Recordings will be available exclusively to ILP members. To learn more about becoming a member, click here.
We are entering a period of rapid technological, economic, and societal transformation, driven by two interrelated forces—each bringing both promise and risk.
The rise of AI and a new relationship with knowledge is unlocking powerful tools for creativity, productivity, and human well-being—capabilities long imagined and now arriving with unprecedented speed. At the same time, we face mounting global and domestic challenges, including geopolitical tensions, disrupted supply chains, demographic shifts, and the accelerating impacts of climate change.
The convergence of these forces will shape every dimension of our society, from national security and economic competitiveness to personal creativity and workforce skills. Every industry, from education to energy, finance to media, will be affected.
How can we thrive in this evolving landscape? How do we harness these opportunities while mitigating the risks? This symposium will convene MIT faculty, industry leaders, and government stakeholders to examine the technologies driving this change and explore how individuals, organizations, and nations can respond with purpose and resilience.
Dr. Srinivasan is a distinguished scientist who received her PhD in Microbiology from The Ohio State University in 2004, where she contributed to the discovery of the 22nd amino acid, Pyrrolysine (2002). She first came to MIT as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Tom Rajbhandary’s lab, where her research focused on understanding protein synthesis mechanisms in Archaea.
Dr. Srinivasan subsequently moved into the business development and technology licensing space, serving in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, where she helped commercialize technologies in medical devices and alternative energies. She then moved to UMass Medical School’s Office of Technology Management in 2009 and to Emory University in Atlanta in 2014 as the Director of Public and Private Partnerships for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. In 2019, Dr. Srinivasan joined Emory’s Office of Corporate Relations as Executive Director, and in 2021, she led the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations.
Chancellor, MIT Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science, MIT Department of Political Science
Melissa Nobles is Chancellor and Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As chancellor, Melissa Nobles is responsible for overseeing more than 60 interconnected offices that support undergraduate and graduate students’ academic success, foster community and wellbeing, and cultivate personal and intellectual growth. Chancellor Nobles works closely with senior leaders to develop and implement the Institute’s strategic priorities.
Throughout her distinguished career at MIT, Nobles’ leadership has resulted in the creation of a new theater building and a forthcoming music building, which will be a state-of-the-art center for music research, innovation, and performance. Nobles also championed the pioneering “MIT & Slavery” research class; secured new support for graduate students, postdocs, and professorships in SHASS; and launched several labs focused on digital humanities, music technology, election data and science, and climate action.
Nobles’ teaching includes graduate courses in transitional justice, ethnic politics, and nationalism as well as undergraduate courses in comparative politics, Latin American studies, ethnic conflict in world politics, and social movements in comparative perspective. Her international, comparative research focuses on restorative justice in light of ethnic and racial conflicts. She is the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and is the co-editor with Jun-Hyeok Kwak of Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia (Routledge Press, 2013). Her work has also appeared in the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Social Research, Daedalus, American Journal of Public Health, and several edited books.
Her current research is focused on examining racial murders in the American South, 1930–1954. Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern University Law School's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and previously unknown racial murders, and contributing to several legal investigations. In fall 2022, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive was publicly released for scholarly and public use. She contributes to the US national dialogue about racial equity through thoughtful research-based commentaries that draw on her scholarship in the field.
Nobles graduated from Brown University with a degree in history and received her MA and PhD in political science from Yale University. She has held fellowships at Boston University's Institute for Race and Social Division and Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. She has served on the editorial boards of Polity, American Political Science Review, and Perspectives on Politics as well as a guest editor for a special issue of Nature. Nobles has also been involved in faculty governance at MIT and beyond, serving as associate chair of the MIT faculty from 2007 to 2009 and vice president of the American Political Science Association.
Associate Dean For Innovation Co-Director MIT Innovation Initiative William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship Faculty Director Legatum Center MIT Sloan School of Management
Professor Dame Fiona Murray is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative for Innovation and also an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
She is an international expert on the transformation of investments in scientific and technical innovation into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. She has a special interest in entrepreneurship, the commercialization of science and the economics of entrepreneurship and innovation. She has done extensive work with entrepreneurs, governments, large corporations and philanthropists designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems: prizes competitions, accelerators, patent licensing rules and proof of concept funding programs.
A former scientist trained at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, Murray has taught and published extensively on fostering cultures that bridge scientific innovation and entrepreneurship, building effective entrepreneurial strategies for science-based businesses (in biotech and biomedical companies and recently, clean energy), and evaluating the commercial potential of novel scientific ideas. Closely tied to real world problems, Fiona works with public policy makers and entrepreneurs designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems: prizes competitions, accelerators, patent licensing rules and proof of concept funding programs. She also works with large global corporations who seek to leverage the ideas of a wide range of internal scientists as well as external entrepreneurs through novel programs such as prize competitions. Her recent engagements have focused on relationships that span the public and private sectors. She is particularly interested in new emerging organizational arrangements for the effective commercialization of science, including public-private partnerships, not-for-profits, venture philanthropy, and university-initiated seed funding and innovation-focused competitions and prizes.
After a short time on the faculty of Oxford University’s Said Business School, Murray joined MIT Sloan where she is now Faculty Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. In this role, Fiona works on the design and delivery of entrepreneurship education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She teaches the “Innovation Teams” course, which assembles teams of students from across MIT to learn the process of technology commercialization, with a focus on evaluating a technology’s potential for significant commercial and social impact. She has recently started the REAL course – Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab - which gives students practical and academic insights into the design and development of entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. These courses encourage cross-campus collaborations that move scientific discoveries closer towards marketable products and allow for students from different stakeholder perspectives to understand the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. She also has a particular interest in the entrepreneurial education of scientists and engineers, and in the role of women in entrepreneurship and commercialization of science.
Fiona has spoken at events worldwide about building entrepreneurial capacity built upon the engine of scientific research. She also speaks in academic and policy settings on innovation and intellectual property in the scientific community. She has been published in a wide range of journals, including Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Sociology, Research Policy, Organization Science, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Murray has served on the faculty at MIT Sloan since 1999. In 2006 she was promoted to Associate Professor in the Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship Strategic Management Group and in 2009 became Faculty Director of the Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Previously, Murray held positions at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, the Asian Development Bank, and United Nations Environment Program in Kenya.
Murray received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in Chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in Applied Sciences. She serves on the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology in the United Kingdom.
Dr Phil Budden is a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Management School, in Sloan's TIES (Tech Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy) Group, where he focuses on 'corporate innovation’ and multi-stakeholder innovation ecosystems, especially how corporates can get value from the latter (including start-up enterprises). He works closely with corporate executives and leaders of other large organisations on such strategies, through MIT Corporate Relations/ILP, the Corporate Innovation Program (https://corporateinnovation.mit.edu), Executive Education (https://executive.mit.edu/ci) and MIT’s global REAP program (https://reap.mit.edu), as well as custom and consulting work.