Big Ideas in Small Packages
Innovations need a shorter route to market.
Innovation remains the distinctive U.S. advantage; we have no shortage of smart, ambitious people with brilliant new ideas, and a great many of them have ties to MIT. But if we want a thriving economy producing more and better jobs, we need more of those ideas to get to market faster. Today, on average, hardware startups coming out of MIT that require new processes, materials, or manufacturing methods can take more than 10 years to have an impact in the market. The sense of lost opportunity is painful.

At MIT, we are developing strategies to help accelerate all the steps from discovery to invention to production to profitability. At the national level, we are helping to lead the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which links federal and state governments, universities, community colleges, and companies of every size in a drive to rebuild the strength of U.S. manufacturing around advanced technologies. On campus, we have launched an Innovation Initiative focused on ways to enhance every aspect of innovation ecosystems, including our own. And we are beginning work on “MIT.nano.” This $350 million facility at the heart of campus—occupying the footprint of Building 12—will accelerate research and innovation that take advantage of the way materials behave at the atomic scale. By providing first-class facilities for as much as 20 percent of campus research, MIT.nano will foster the kind of collaborative community that is fueling the growth of Kendall Square as an innovation hub and that inspires so many of our graduates to start companies of their own.
As we see so often in MIT Technology Review, ideas that survive the long journey to the marketplace can save lives, create jobs, relieve suffering, reduce waste, increase efficiency, generate joy, build human connection—and change the game in hundreds of other ways. By compressing the time from innovation to impact, we also serve the world.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.