Exciting Minds: MIT/CRE's Annual Partner Meeting
One of our partners said it best: "Real innovation comes from the synthesis of ideas."
That synthesis is exactly what the MIT Center for Real Estate seeks in our annual Partner Meetings – a gathering of our industry sponsors from around the world to connect, imagine, and re-think the future of real estate.
Since the Center's inception in 1985, we have hosted this yearly meeting on or near the MIT campus for the kind of innovative cross-fertilization of ideas that is unique to MIT.
These gatherings (usually two days in length) invigorate the relationship between the Center and its sponsors, while also highlighting MIT's intellectual capital in real estate, architecture, engineering, and more.
An entertaining exchange of ideas and information between MIT and the real estate community, the Partner Meetings invite sponsors to join us in thinking of how science and technology can redefine real estate.
Themes for past Partner Meetings have included….
- Innovation in Action. How advances in technology, the arts, and the media are challenging the ways we think about building. This meeting included a tour of MIT's Media Lab, one of the world's preeminent showcases for new concepts in design, communications, and collaborative research.
- Building Flexibility. How real options theory is transforming real estate with approaches proven in the aerospace and automotive industries. This meeting included presentations from Prof. Olivier de Weck in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Prof. Richard de Neufville in the Engineering Systems Division.
- Powering the Future. A look at the profound relationship between energy and real estate, its environmental economics, and how we can practically redefine that relationship in the decades to come. This meeting included a presentation by Mr. Jón Björn Skúlason, the General Manager of Icelandic New Energy, a hydrogen-based fuel research and development consortium in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Topics focus typically on real estate issues. But in the MIT spirit that all science is related, topics have also offered surprising glimpses at other fields of science – such as the genetics of zebra fish as presented by noted biologist Prof. Nancy Hopkins, as well as tours of the MIT reactor, the Plasma Fusion Center, and the MIT Museum.
The Partner Meeting is an invaluable forum for communication – it lets the Center showcase the pioneering work at the Institute, but also gives us the chance to appreciate and learn from our partners, whose feedback guides our research and education programs.
And of course the Meeting is a unique networking opportunity for partners. They may represent diverse interests from around the world, but they all share one trait – a recognition of the tremendous potential in science and technology for enhancing the built environment.
Come to MIT/CRE and think again. Join us on April 19th and 20th for our next Partner Meeting. For more information and a detailed agenda, contact Lisa Thoma, Associate Director, at 617.253.2680. Look forward to seeing you!
