Help MIT Solve Global Problems with Open Innovation

Last month at the United Nations, MIT’s new Solve initiative brought innovators to pitch their most promising solutions to challenges we issued on refugee education, carbon emissions, and chronic disease. Their solutions blew us away. An online, accredited university providing Bachelors and Associate degrees for refugees and displaced youth. Solar-powered flying pods creating a new mass transit system in cities and along rail corridors. An app turning pictures of meals into nutritional information to empower life-style changes for diabetes patients.

Next month at MIT, we’re bringing back our “Solvers,” the teams with the best solutions we heard at the UN. From May 8-10, they’ll meet with executive-level Solve community members from the private, public, and social impact spheres to workshop their solutions and forge partnerships that help their solutions scale. And we’ll announce new challenges for the coming year across our four pillars: education, sustainability, health, and economic prosperity.

Solve is a marketplace for human-centered technology. We issue these challenges for anybody from around the world to apply. We identify the best solutions through open innovation. And we build and convene a community of leaders and change-makers who have the resources, the expertise, the mentorship, and the know-how to get each solution piloted, scaled, and implemented.

Think you can help? Then we want you to join us next month at Solve at MIT from May 8-10.

How? Become a member of our community.

Solve at MIT next month is an opportunity for our members to meet each other and to partner with our Solvers. And on the MIT campus and in the MIT Media Lab, our members will meet with our staff, our advisors, and our featured speakers including:

• Ursula Burns, Chairman, Xerox Corporation
• Ash Carter, 25^thSecretary of Defense, Director of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Innovation Fellow
• Amar Hanspal, Chief Product Officer and interim co-CEO, Autodesk
• Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson and Managing Director, Biocon Limited
• Ernest J. Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Emeritus and Special Advisor to the MIT President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

And Solve at MIT is only your first bite at the apple. Here’s what the next year looks like for our members:

1. First access to innovative ideas and the people who pitch them. Be the first to meet our Solvers, experience their groundbreakings solutions, and connect with them through events, mentorship, and partnerships.
2. Connections to a network of change-makers. It’s not just the Solvers. Take part in our community of leading experts in education, sustainability, health, and economic prosperity at MIT and across the private, public, nonprofit, and academic sectors.
3. Active participation as a thought leader. We need your help at workshops to provide input on the next Solve challenges. And we need you to support and mentor our Solvers as they develop, pilot, and scale their solutions.
4. Personalized support from the Solve Staff. We’re matchmakers, and we have fun doing it. Our staff will introduce you directly to Solvers and other members who can help you achieve your social and environmental impact goals.

Membership at Solve is by invitation only. And for a starting rate of $5,000, it lasts for 12 months. Come offer your expertise at our Solve-a-thons throughout the summer where innovators design and prototype potential solutions to our new challenges. Judge the next pitches for yourself at our pitch events this fall. And take part in our Solver bootcamps and meetings through next winter and spring as our next round of Solvers carry through their solutions. 

Solve needs your help. We’re asking for your expertise, human capital, technology, and funding. We’re asking you to establish partnerships with other members and with our Solvers. We’re asking you to provide mentorship, share best practices, facilitate introductions, and promote our challenges.

Join us at Solve at MIT. Become a member. Help us create this marketplace.

We can’t wait to meet you – and we can’t wait for you to meet our Solvers – next month right here on the MIT campus.

To find out more about becoming a member of Solve, go to solve.mit.edu/membership or contact us directly at membership@solve.mit.edu.