MIT Innovation Initiative (MITii)

he MIT Innovation Initiative (MITii) works with all five MIT schools to strengthen the educational pathways and networks for students, alumni, and partners to move ideas from conception to impact. In MIT’s tradition of mens et manus, we do so by combining hands-on, global opportunities for building expertise in the innovation process with insights developed from the evidence-based science of innovation.

MITii administers the interdisciplinary Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor. The minor is designed to prepare MIT undergraduates to serve as leaders in the innovation economy with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to develop, scale, and deliver breakthrough solutions to real-world problems.

The Innovation Initiative also leads several efforts to strengthen MIT’s ability to provide students with hands-on opportunities to learn about making, prototyping and manufacturing. These activities are delivered through Project Manus, the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node, and new campus innovation hubs for co-working and collaboration.

Through the MIT Innovation Initiative Laboratory for Innovation Science and Policy, the initiative is systematically investigating the factors that shape innovation outcomes—including policies, incentives, institutions and infrastructure -- at every level from individual and organizational to region, national and global.

The MIT Innovation Initiative is advancing the science of innovation—an emerging field that uses a diversity of methods to empirically investigate how possible interventions influence desired outcomes.

(*) Advanced Manufacturing: Organizations across MIT participate in a wide range of research, policy, and educational efforts in the area of advanced manufacturing. By engaging and leading these efforts across disciplines and as part of public-private consortiums, MIT helps to ensure that we can not only “invent it here” but also “make it here” in manufacturing volumes beyond initial prototyping.

(*) Lab for Innovation Science and Policy: The MIT Innovation Initiative Lab for Innovation Science and Policy is an MIT-wide laboratory recently established to help develop the area of ‘innovation science’ -- an emerging field that can be thought of as applying the scientific method to the practice of innovation.

Using a diversity of methods, the lab empirically investigates how innovation occurs, and pioneers more systematic assessments of possible interventions (such as policies, programs or incentives) to achieve desired innovation outcomes (such as the creation of innovation-driven enterprises, and in the longer run, job creation, economic and social impact, and a vibrant innovation economy). The Lab for Innovation Science and Policy aims to become the place that policymakers, senior executives, and entrepreneurial leaders turn for evidence-based guidance on the design of innovation-focused job policies and programs in their organizations, local regions and nations.