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The MIT Innovation Club hosts programs that seek to understand both the intellectual and the practical aspect of innovation. The following are some of our programs that directly help our members form new ideas and develop new technologies.

Innovation Labs (I-Labs)

Innovation Labs bring together qualified and motivated Sloan students, Media Lab researchers, professors, and the business community. The student teams offer researchers a wider outlet to assess the commercial viability of scientific and engineering innovations. Each team is expected to research and identify target applications and markets for the technology and begin to identify the appropriate business model and go-to-market strategy for commercialization of the market-driven technology developed in the Media Lab. Additionally, the projects allow Media Lab sponsors to examine technological directions and identify potential product markets that may not be apparent during early stage development.

Technology Testbeds

Technology Testbeds offer our members a chance to evaluate and improve emerging products, and to understand their impact on our lives, before most of the people do. By mindfully using new technologies in the real world, we can begin to see what the future holds for us. By thinking through what the future will be like, we may make better predictions about what else might be needed to make the vision of a new technology a reality.

IdeaExchange Brainstorms

IdeaExchange sessions offer our members an opportunity to collaborate with faculty, industry experts, and fellow students to learn about emerging technologies and to brainstorm their potential applications and associated trends. Instead of passively listening to the speaker, IdeaExchange attendees actively participate in the discussion, and, as a bonus, learn structured approaches to generating new ideas.

During these events, the Innovation Club presents current and future products and services to students before walking them through an interactive brainstorming session on topics such as marketing, branding, pricing, features, functionality, and strategy. The contents of the session (i.e. video, audio, transcript) are either delivered live to the host company or entrepreneur or are packaged and sent to the host after the session is completed.

Digital Innovation and Anthropology

One of our founders, Joost Bonsen, helped create the Digital Innovation class, offered jointly by the MIT Media Lab and MIT Sloan and taught by Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland. The course studies the actual usage of emerging digital technologies to understand how they will impact people's lives. Details

Innovation Club Speaker Series

Our club's Innovation Speaker Series seeks to educate MIT students about the science and practice of innovation. During these events, students learn about the process of innovation through multiple levels of analysis from understanding creativity in the individual, to exploring ways in which firms can innovate on their products, to understanding how inventions diffuse through our society.

Lead User Method

MIT Sloan Professor Eric von Hippel achieved surprising results after studying the sources of innovation. He established that more often than not, innovations are developed by the users who actually use these innovations, not by the companies that productize the early ideas into commercial products. This realization led to the development of completely new way to generate innovative ideas, the Lead User Method. You can learn more about it at Read more about it at Lead User Concepts, Inc.

Innovator's Dilemma and Solution

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen studied why innovative companies tended to fail in the long run. He concluded that the sources of the failures are often the very activities that business consider "best practices." For instance, businesses often believe that they should constantly improve their technology to earn better margins from more sophisticated customers. Unfortunately, this pursuit may lead to the company loosing its innovative edge and eventually going out of style and out of business. In his books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, Professor Christensen describes this problem and offers a solution. You can learn more about this topic in the article Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation.

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