Learning to Innovate: Professionals Come to MIT

Where can industry professionals learn the key concepts and practices that make MIT synonymous with innovation? Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Education, says several short programs offered last summer for the first time are a good start.

The Radical Innovation course taught by Mechanical Engineering Professor Sanjay Sarma, an entrepreneur and pioneer in modern RFID technology, addresses issues facing both established organizations and startups.

One concept he teaches is Creative Destruction, which is particularly appropriate for large firms. “The basic idea is that any company or enterprise where things are going great can slowly slip into maintenance mode and innovate less,” says Sarma, who co-founded the MIT Auto-ID Center. “The firm becomes ripe for attack by a small company that is willing to do things completely differently.”

Established companies need to rip through the complacency of success and recreate the conditions of innovation, he says. This is essential because so many small startups now also have access to the ingredients of innovation—people, opportunity, context, and technology. “In the past 10 years, the little guys have big guns in terms of technology and the gun factory is MIT.”

Sarma’s course teaches the fundamentals of intrapreneurship— establishing small, creative groups that can tap major resources but operate quickly without the weight of corporate hierarchy. These small groups also need to share in the financial rewards, he says.

Startup issues are addressed with practical advice about finances, marketing, and intellectual property drawn from running Sarma’s own software company, OATSystems.

“An idea is worth nothing—it is a tree in the forest,” Sarma says. “You make your idea a success by being the CEO of your idea and make it something that can survive in the marketplace with all the layers it needs to be viable.”

Another new course, Innovations in Sustainable Urban Mobility, was led by an MIT Media Lab team that examined new ideas about city living and transportation. Kent Larson, who directs the Changing Places research group, and Research Specialist Ryan Chin MA ’00, SM ’00, who has led development of lightweight electric vehicles such as MIT’s CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel Smart Bicycle, shared their work and conducted collaborative brainstorming sessions to test new ideas.

“There is an emerging consensus that a new model for urban mobility is needed to reduce congestion, pollution, and energy consumption,” Larson says. “We advocate an ecosystem of mass transit and networked, shared electronic and human-powered vehicles that are optimized for urban use. We believe that such a system can serve a population with fewer vehicles that use far less energy and that are more convenient, affordable, and pleasurable for urban dwellers.”

Chin says their concept of innovation combines technology, policy, behavior change, and economics. They took the MIT campus as their laboratory with students using a computer model to work on ways to reduce CO2 emissions through transportation choices such as ride sharing.

MIT Professional Education students will get a glimpse of the product development innovation cycle that the Media Lab uses to engage sponsors, says Chin. Participants ranged from employees of Best Buy, which is starting a transportation division, to a city planner from Bangladesh, auto suppliers from Detroit, and architects from South America.

Another course, From Technology to Innovation: Putting Ideas to Work, led by Center for International Studies Research Associate Sanford L. Weiner, focuses on the organizational change required for successful implementation of technology-driven innovations.

“This course went to the heart of creating innovation within organizations,” says a participant from GE Global Research. “Any institution would benefit from a thorough understanding of the complexities involved; they are presented in this program by experts who have witnessed and managed these complexities first-hand.”

Architecting the Future Enterprise, another popular course first offered a few years ago, is taught by Donna Rhodes, senior lecturer in the MIT Engineering Systems Division. This course is based on a decade of research that has examined enterprises as systems in themselves.

“Innovation is commonly thought of as creating new and novel products and services within an enterprise. Our course brings innovation into the conversation on how to design enterprises themselves,” Rhodes notes. “In an enterprise or any complex system, opportunities for innovation are often found at the interfaces. We teach practical methods to uncover these innovation opportunities, in the context of thinking about the whole enterprise and where it sits in the world at large.”

Pant says the new short programs are a good start on helping corporations, large organizations, as well as startups worldwide—a majority of participants come from outside the U.S.—learn how to apply critical lessons about innovation to their fields and circumstances.

“MIT is equated with innovation,” Pant says. “People see all that is happening at MIT and they ask how can I learn this? This is a need we had to fulfill—this hunger in industry.”