MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice is harnessing three major trends of the 21st century—the bottom-up economy, the ubiquity of technology and the on-demand nature of learning—through the introduction of a new Lab. The Community Innovation Lab serves as a catalyst for innovation by supporting collaboration across the traditional boundaries of the citizen sector, the high-technology industry and MIT students and faculty. Through its initiatives in education, research, and relationships with community organizers and technical visionaries, the CI Lab empowers leaders of many kinds to respond to real-world concerns with relevant technologies.

Given the mission of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century—it is the ideal home for the Community Innovation Lab. The Institute, like the Lab, is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges today and into the future.