As the world looks to “innovate” its way out of the global economic slowdown – innovation is no longer a dirty word; it’s back and better than ever. And just as innovation bridges the gap between idea generation and value creation, the MIT Innovation Club bridges the gap between academia and industry as we seek to understand innovation as both a science and a practice of generating and implementing new ideas.

To that end, our programs are designed with one central focus: providing practical, hands-on opportunities for our members to innovate, innovate, innovate!

This year we’re doing a little innovating ourselves! We have a pipeline of activities for 2009-2010, some are familiar like our speaker series and our company/lab tours, but we’re also launching a lot of new ones from our Innovation Labs with the MIT Media Lab and innoShips projects with local companies to our new case competition with Microsoft. We’re also launching a series of discussion panels around the topics of innovative leadership, the innovation ecosystem, and social innovations empowering the poor.

Most importantly, we’re actively building a community that will create a richer experience for our members and affiliates, now and in the future. The executive committee has been reaching out across the MIT campus to foster relationships with other departments and centers of innovation in the MIT community and develop strategic partnerships with companies in the greater New England area. We hope you’ll join us in this pursuit and connect with us. We look forward to hearing from you about opportunities to share ideas and collaborate on future programs. As innovators, we know that innovation isn’t something you do once and you’re done – innovation never sleeps and neither will we.

Ash Martin
President, MIT Innovation Club
2009-2010