Principal Investigator Joseph Ferreira
Project Website http://www.boston.com/news/specials/futureboston/
Project Start Date September 2007
FutureBoston examines the competitive challenges Boston faces in an increasingly globalized world, and how the city and region can address them.
FutureBoston, convened by State Street Corp. and MIT, is a multi-year civic dialogue -- online and in person -- aimed at developing recommendations and proposals in three topic areas: Health, Design, and Sustainability.
The project launched on September 4, 2007, with “IdeaJAMs” hosted online using an innovative new social networking tool called Zude, and aimed at engaging talented entrepreneurs worldwide to solve problems of global importance, using Boston as the laboratory. The IdeaJAMs portion concludes with three day-long symposiums, hosted at MIT on October 16-18, 2007. These symposiums will bring together experts in the three fields, venture capitalists, and the best ideas generated from the Internet.
The goal of FutureBOSTON is to spark a worldwide interactive dialogue about key aspects of urban life in the coming century. It also hopes to illustrate the significance of the research university to the economic life of the Boston region."
In addition, the project will draw energy and inspiration from Boston’s renowned institutions of research, medicine and culture to answer the MIT Challenge: How to better connect these institutions to the economic life of the region, thus enhancing metropolitan Boston’s competitive edge.
The goal with this project is to spark a worldwide interactive dialogue on how to engage Boston's intellectual and cultural institutions, and to illustrate the significance of the research university to the economic life of the Boston region.
FutureBoston activities in 2007 culminate in the FutureBoston Forum, televised live from MIT on November 5, 2007, where a national panel will present its recommendations for the future of Boston.
FutureBoston is the fifth in a series of major events focused on the future of Boston, convened by MIT over the last 23 years. In each project, MIT helped reshape the face of Boston, from the real estate boom in the 1980s to reclamation of the land above the Central Artery in 2002.
The Interactive Symposia are online experiments to see how far collaborators can go in framing concepts, generating models and posting their ideas on the web.
FutureBOSTON will culminate in a WCVB-TV5 television special,"FutureBOSTON Prime Time," to be broadcast live from MIT in May 2008. It will introduce the winners of the three IdeaJAMS, and present the recommendations of a national panel of judges, including Carleton "Carly" S. Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard; Rep. Edward J. Markey; and Yung Ho Chang, head of MIT's Department of Architecture.