Course Syllabus

Follow this link to download an advanced Draft of the Fall 2024 Syllabus.

About Innovation Teams 10.807 / 2.907 / 15.371

Faculty Director: Luis Perez-Breva

Instructors: Luis Perez-Breva, Doug Hart

What if technologies were like raw superpowers – and your job was to find out how to use them to solve problems that matter?

Most would rally behind the belief that technology ought to change the world for the better—solve problems that matter. But what does that even mean?

In this course you'll work with peers from across the institute on technology projects from MIT Labs in a multi-discipline team. We’ll show you how to explore several possible “destinations” at once—venturing into the impossible (see A.C. Clarke’s laws of prediction). We’ll show you how to take technology to society to solve a meaningful problem. That’s a significant scale-up endeavor driven by a desire to build systems that don’t fail in ways that could have been predicted.

Specifically, in this course you will :

work with a multii-discipline team on an actual MIT technology project coming from an MIT lab or on a problem in need of technology. We will present and you will choose projects over the first two weeks;
learn how to scope, explore, and solve problems with technology;
learn the skills needed to invent, develop, and stress-test technology organizations that fail to fail;
and learn and practice skills to scope opportunities for technology that are in high demand from corporations, innovation groups, government, as well as the most advanced venture capital firms operating venture invention laboratories.

Register for 10.807 / 2.907/ 15.371 Innovation Teams.

Thought Leadership

In the past decade, students like you have shepherded over 200 MIT technologies to impact via iTeams and applied the same skills repeatedly to their own innovating adventures. Some 40 new, enduring deep tech companies have emerged directly from their work in iTeams. iTeams is housed in the School of Engineering and serves students the institute over.

From iTeams, we have pioneered a way to move technology to impact systematically and shared it with the world since 2007. See, for instance, Luis' response to NSF’s request for input about how to extract more value from technology https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/151777

Expectations

First class meets: Friday Sept 6 at 9AM in 56-154

Scheduled times: T1-3 (66-168 TBC) F9.00-12.30 (56-154)

For more about our style of teaching and all we've learned about teaching in a pandemic, check Luis' writeup on MIT's Faculty Newsletter "Education for non-robots"

Iteams Poster