MIT’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Thrives--In Classrooms and Out

No surprise—MIT is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity from faculty-student spinoffs to hands-on classes to organizations that help students, faculty, and alumni turn promising ideas into great businesses. Alumni can get involved either to promote their own business ideas or to act as mentors to budding entrepreneurs.

The collective results are impressive:

• MIT alumni and faculty start more than 200 new companies every year;
• Hewlett-Packard, Bose, and Intel and newcomers A123 Systems, Zipcar, and Dropbox are among the thousands of MIT-related businesses;
• Collectively, these firms have created millions of jobs;
• And generated some $2 trillion a year in revenues.

Learn more about these resources—and alumni opportunities—in an MIT News Office series. The first article, Outside the Classroom, Students Create Future Businesses, profiles organizations such as the MIT Entrepreneurs Club (E-Club), the Entrepreneurship Center, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the MIT Enterprise Forum.

Groups like the Venture Mentoring Service, led by former Bose Corp. CEO Sherwin Greenblatt ’62, SM ’64, matches would-be entrepreneurs with experienced businesspeople to guide them from refining an idea to launching a business.

The second piece, Classes and Academic Research Help Launch Companies, zeros in on classes that foster the skills needed to start and manage a business as well as to generate ideas and develop them into real-world companies. Project-based classes in all five schools give students time and resources.

Joost Bonsen ’90, SM ’06, a lecturer in the MIT Media Lab, teaches many such classes and co-directs the Media Lab’s entrepreneurship program with Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Sandy Pentland PhD ’82. “There are classes at every stage of this process,” Bonsen says, from brainstorming all the way to production and marketing."