Michael Cima is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Associate Dean for Innovation, and Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Innovation Initiative.

Prof. Cima holds 80 US patents and is the co-inventor of MIT’s three-dimensional printing process.  He is a Fellow of the American Ceramics Society, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.

He co-founded SpringLeaf Therapeutics, Taris Biomedical, which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson,  MicroChips Inc, and T2 Biosystems for which he also serves as director.  BIO

Gene R. Keselman is the Executive Director of the MIT Innovation Initiative. In this role, he works to develop overall strategy and to pilot new programs to meet the Initiative’s goal of enhancing innovation and entrepreneurship across the MIT campus and around the world through evidence-based educational programs, infrastructure, and communities.  BIO

Each team will present a brief overview of their organization:

• Boehringer Ingelheim
• JP Morgan Asset Management
• InterSystems
• Lockheed Martin
• Teck Resources

Innovation interviews and surveys with employees at each of our member companies generated valuable insights into the state of corporate innovation. These insights informed CIP development during the design year.

For most organizations, the process to generate new products and services is relatively well-defined and favours “business as usual”. As a result, most companies excel in incremental innovation, but struggle with development of new technologies that have the potential to create brand new markets.

By working through six fundamental questions, corporations can develop a more effective approach to their interaction with universities, thus delivering more value for both parties and setting the stage for more effective ecosystem engagement.

Dr. Newman served as NASA Deputy Administrator (2015-17), the first female engineer in this role, and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

Dr. Newman has been principal investigator on four spaceflight missions, including the Space Shuttle, Russian Mir Space Station and the International Space Station, and is best known for her revolutionary BioSuit™ planetary spacesuit.  Her research and teaching expertise include aerospace biomedical engineering, astronaut performance, advanced space suit design, leadership development, innovation and space policy.

Professional Site

MIT researches and teaches about innovation, both ‘Innovation’ (with a capital “I”), meaning formal processes of taking science, research at the horizon through to impact, and ‘innovative’ behaviour’ (with a little “i”), signifying a more widely applicable behaviour/culture.  Many of the insights about ‘innovative behaviour’ are informed by research into the practices at the frontier of world-class ‘Innovation’.

Many strategic change efforts fail. And virtually all of them are harder than they need to be. Why is this? And what can you do to make change more likely to stick? Dr. Elsbeth Johnson is an expert in leadership, strategy and change and challenges some of our most fundamental beliefs about how to lead change in an organization.

Proto Ventures is a new approach to venture formation from within MIT. It oversees the emergence of new ventures along a full lifecycle: from discovery of ideas and resources at MIT—exploration of the problem-solution space; a methodical de-risking process; and helping building a “proto venture” that demonstrates the viability of the venture.

Three elements of modern technology are making new ideas appear at such an extraordinary pace: the sheer rate of technical progress, the abundance of tools that are placing advanced technologies within the reach of new entrants, and the extraordinary opportunities created by convergence.

Furthermore, technologies such as IoT, machine learning, computer vision, and robotics are impacting businesses in existential ways. Meanwhile, consumers have changed too, becoming much more open to new business models, whether it is the sharing economy or subscription retail.

Prof. Sarma will discuss some of the salient features of innovation in the modern world and to lay out the philosophy, tools, procedures, and incentives that an organization can adopt to drive innovation.

We’ll discuss upcoming program modules and next steps in preparing for virtual CIP Hackathons with our member companies.

Whether it happens among students in a classroom, or engineers in a laboratory, innovation is a process, a series of steps that begins with imagination, and results in the creation of something of value for society.  The creation of intellectual property takes vision and perseverance in order to transform an idea into something that is real and tangible.

Innovation infrastructure is a bundle of physical, digital, social, and economic resources that are co-designed as a cohesive unit to provide innovators, entrepreneurs, and organizations with a platform for translating good ideas into high impact outcomes.

Breakout sessions:

Corporate teams will participate in company-specific curated discussions of experiences and lessons learned during the MIT Innovation Fundamental event.

Inclusion is a key factor for innovation that can help unearth inherent biases in technological solutions, educate organizations to make better decisions, drive stronger performance, and provide organizations with a competitive edge.

Innovation at the Mesoscale:  Instrumentation and Design of the Team of Teams

Why do some teams perform with innovation when facing the most daunting, complex challenges, and others fail? Decades of research have focused at the microscale, individuals and small teams for relatively simple tasks, and also at the macro-scale, the level of the firm and market.  However, many choices to shape innovative outcomes exist in between — at the project level.  Dr. Moser will share emerging methods for a closer look at the mesoscale: how teams interact with one another, across a complex solution architecture, towards solving a problem meaningful to diverse stakeholders. These new techniques are fueling new research on innovation and real-time feedback for teams as they perform.  Instrumented work, analytics, and interactive visualization reveal and stimulate the health of teamwork as a sociotechnical system.

How are emerging technologies transforming the nature of human work and the set of skills that enable humans to thrive in the digital economy?  How can we shape and catalyze technological innovation to complement these changes?