Frontiers of Innovation and Entrepeneurship

Neil Thompson

Neil is the Director of the FutureTech research project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and a Principal Investigator at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he co-directed the Experimental Innovation Lab (X-Lab), and a Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. He has advised businesses and government on the future of Moore’s Law, has been on National Academies panels on transformational technologies and scientific reliability, and is part of the Council on Competitiveness’ National Commission on Innovation & Competitiveness Frontiers. He has a PhD in Business and Public Policy from Berkeley, where he also did Masters degrees in Computer Science and Statistics. He also has a masters in Economics from the London School of Economics, and undergraduate degrees in Physics and International Development. Prior to academia, He worked at organizations such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bain and Company, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Canadian Parliament.

Erin L. Scott

Erin, PhD, draws upon her academic and practical experience to partner with groundbreaking innovators to successfully navigate the entrepreneurial journey from initial idea to commercialization. Her research focuses on Strategy for Startups, has been published in leading journals such as Harvard Business Review and Management Science, and will be released in a forthcoming book published by Norton. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Scott mentors early-stage entrepreneurs and teaches the award-winning Entrepreneurial Strategy course (MBA and EMBA) and the popular Entrepreneurial Founding & Teams course (MBA). Prior to MIT Sloan, Dr. Scott was an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore Business School. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy Group. A recipient of the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship, she earned her Ph.D. in Strategy from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013. Dr. Scott also holds an MBA-MS and BE in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University, respectively. She previously evaluated and consulted for early-stage ventures in the medical device and biotechnology sectors.

Mercedes Delgado

Mercedes is Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and Researcher at MIT. She teaches strategy and entrepreneurship courses at the Master’s and executive levels. Delgado’s research examines the role of regional industry clusters—geographic concentrations of related industries, firms, and supporting institutions—in job creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, inclusivity, and resilience. Delgado has developed new methods for defining and mapping industry clusters and the supply chain economy. This work provides tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers design innovation strategies. In recent work, she explores the organizational and locational drivers of the inventor gender gap, developing frameworks and metrics to support inclusion. Delgado’s work has been published in top economic, policy, and strategy journals. She has received several prestigious fellowships and research grants, including a graduate fellowship from Fundación Rafael del Pino and a recent National Science Foundation grant on Mapping the Inventor Gender Gap. She served as a lead researcher on the US Cluster Mapping Project: Mapping a Nation of Regional Clusters. Delgado has engaged with hundreds of startups and serves as a mentor at AcexHealth (health accelerator of Andalucía). Delgado holds an MA in Economics from Northwestern University and a PhD in Business Economics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy Group.

Michael Cusumano

Michael is the SMR Distinguished Professor of Management and Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously he held a joint appointment in the School of Engineering. Professor Cusumano specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in computer software as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. At MIT, he has recently taught Platform Strategy & Entrepreneurship as well as Strategy & the CEO. During 2016-17, he was on leave as Special Vice President and Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Tokyo University of Science, where he founded the Tokyo Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center and designed a new mid-career Management of Technology curriculum as well as a new business school that merged the Graduate School of Innovation and the School of Management. Cusumano received a BA degree from Princeton 1976 and a PhD from Harvard in 1984, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Production and Operations Management at the Harvard Business School during 1984-86. He is fluent in Japanese and has lived and worked in Japan for more than eight years, with two Fulbright Fellowships and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for studying at Tokyo University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Imperial College, Tokyo University, Hitotsubashi University, the University of St. Gallen, the University of Maryland, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He has consulted and lectured for approximately 100 organizations, including Alcatel, Amadeus, AOL, ARM, AT&T, BMC Software, Business Objects, Cisco, Ericsson, Fiat, Ford, Fujitsu, GE, Fidelity, Hitachi, Huawei, i2 Technologies, IBM, Intel, Liberty Mutual, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorola, NASA, NEC, Nokia, NTT Data, Philips, Robert Bosch, Schlumberger, Siemens, Texas Instruments, Toyota, Toshiba, and Verizon. He is currently a director of two publicly listed financial services and technology companies: Orix Corporation in Japan and Ferratum Group in Europe. He is a former director of Patni Computer Systems in India (sold in 2011 for $1.2 billion) and Fixstars Corporation, a Japanese developer of high-performance software applications. He was recently a director of Zylotech, a predictive analytics company operating out of Cambridge, MA. He has served as editor-in-chief and chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review and writes regularly on Technology Strategy and Management for Communications of the ACM. In 2009, he was named one of the most influential people in technology and IT by Silicon.com.

Emilio Castilla

Emilio is the NTU Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Castilla joined the MIT Sloan faculty in 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT, as well as a Research Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. In the recent past, he was also head of the Work and Organizations Studies Group. He received his post-graduate degree in Business Analysis from the Lancaster University Management School (UK) and his PhD and MA in Sociology from Stanford University. Professor Castilla studies how social and organizational processes influence key employment outcomes over time. He tackles his research questions by examining different empirical settings with longitudinal datasets, both at the individual and company levels. His focus is on the recruitment, hiring, compensation, development, and job mobility of employees within and across organizations, as well as on the impact of social relations on performance and innovation. His work has been published in top academic journals and edited volumes, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review. He has also written a book on the use of longitudinal methods in social science research (Elsevier/Academic Press). Professor Castilla has taught in various degree programs at MIT Sloan, the Wharton School, and a number of other international universities. His teaching interests include Strategies for People Analytics, Strategic Human Resource Management, Leading Effective Organizations, Talent Management, Building Successful Careers, and Organizational Behavior. In addition to teaching full-time MBA and executive courses, he has taught several PhD-level seminars.

Fiona Murray

Fiona is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Faculty Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, and the Director of the MIT Innovation Initiative. She is an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Murray holds an MA in chemistry from University of Oxford, and an MS and PhD in engineering and applied sciences from Harvard University. She is an international expert on the transformation of investments in scientific and technical innovation into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. She has done extensive work with entrepreneurs, governments, corporations and philanthropists designing and evaluating programs that shape vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems. Fiona is a member of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’s Council for Science and Technology, and has been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (DCMG) by his majesty King Charles III.

Steven D. Eppinger

Steven is Professor of Management Science and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair. He teaches interdisciplinary courses online and on campus at both the Master’s and executive levels in product design and innovation, engineering project management, and product management. Notably, he has created an interdisciplinary product development course in which graduate students from engineering, management, and industrial design programs collaborate to develop new products. He is coauthor of the textbook Product Design and Development, used by hundreds of universities. His research is applied to improving complex technical project management. Recent work has focused on application of agile software development methods to a range of other industries. Prior research is the basis of the book titled Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications. He is one of the most widely cited scholars in the engineering design and technical management disciplines. Eppinger has served as Deputy Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and has chaired many of MIT’s interdisciplinary masters degree programs (System Design and Management, Integrated Design and Management, Leaders for Global Operations, and Leaders for Manufacturing). He received SB, SM, and ScD degrees from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering before joining the MIT faculty in 1988. He has received many awards and honors including MIT’s Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, the MIT Sloan School’s Award for Innovation and Excellence in Management Education, ASME Best Paper Award in Design Theory and Methodology, INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speaker Award, and PICMET Medal of Excellence Award.

Luis Perez-Breva

Luis is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator and the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto (The MIT Press, 2017). He is an MIT expert in technology innovation, combinatorial innovation, innovation factories, taking deep tech to impact, and applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems. He has enjoyed success with inventions and new companies in security, telecom, fintech, and genetics to name some. Chiefly among them is the AI-based system to locate 911 calls in case of emergency deployed worldwide. His work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC, Wharton Business Radio, Entrepreneur, Zdnet, Quartz, Epsilon Theory and several other national and international media. Currently, Luis is the Faculty Director of Innovation Teams, MIT’s flagship joint enterprise between MIT Engineering and MIT Sloan to put the Institute’s deep tech advances to work to solve real-world problems. Since 2007, through iTeams, he has helped over 200 MIT technologies find a path to impact leading to the formation of some 40 new, enduring deep tech companies across all industries from mining to telecommunications. During the covid pandemic, educational innovations pioneered from iTeams were recognized as key contributions to reinventing education. Luis has worked with venture capital and numerous corporations and adapted his work to develop innovation factories and eliminate innovation waste. Currently, Luis is developing a technology repurposing fund to rescue, recycle, and, in essence, turn around technologies analogous to how private equity seeks to turn around companies. In 2022, Luis received an Extraordinary Leaders Transforming an Industry award from Unorthodox Philanthropy to launch S1 as a new way to deploy and share the benefits from innovation. Dr. Perez-Breva holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT and degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and business from leading universities in Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the United States (MIT). In 2011, the Spanish government recognized his career achievements by awarding him the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain. In 2020 Luis became an American citizen. In 2021 Luis was awarded a Rafael del Pino Foundation Chair.

Michael Kearney

Mike is a Partner at The Engine. He serves as a Board Member for Osmoses, VEIR, Mantel, and Copernic. Before The Engine, Mike was the Executive Director of the MIT Roosevelt Project, an interdisciplinary study on energy transition pathways. He was the 1st employee at a clean-tech startup called Ambri, where he led business development efforts, working with customers in electric power across the United States. Mike holds a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he trained as an economist, with research focused on frictions in the commercialization of science and regulatory barriers to energy innovation and entrepreneurial strategy. Mike received an MS in Technology & Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Williams College.

Pablo Rodríguez-Fernández

Pablo is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Before coming to MIT to get his doctoral degree in Nuclear Science and Engineering, Pablo majored in Industrial Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and Mechanical Engineering at Drexel University. He worked as a research fellow at Politecnico di Milano on turbine optimization via machine learning techniques, which resulted in an award-winning master thesis. His research at the PSFC focuses on fusion energy and plasma physics, particularly on energy transport in tokamaks. Fusion has the potential to provide clean, sustainable, safe and unlimited energy to the world. Towards this goal, Pablo currently works on the physics basis and optimization of SPARC, the first fusion experiment that will generate net energy. During his doctoral thesis research (defended in April 2019), Pablo wrote 5 first-author peer-reviewed journal articles, including a high-impact Physical Review Letter. In this work, Pablo solved a 20-year-old mystery in plasma physics that had been challenging the prediction of future reactors. In 2018, Pablo was awarded the Manson Benedict award (MIT) for academic excellence and professional promise, and the Young Engineer (UPM) early career achievement award.

Vladimir Bulovic

Vladimir is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holding the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. He directs the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory, co-leads the MIT-Eni Solar Frontiers Center, leads the Tata GridEdge program, and is the Founding Director of MIT.nano, MIT’s new 200,000 sqft nano-fabrication, nano-characterization, and prototyping facility that opened in the summer of 2018. He is an author of over 250 research articles (cited over 45,000 times) and an inventor of over 100 U.S. patents in areas of light emitting diodes, lasers, photovoltaics, photodetectors, chemical sensors, programmable memories, and micro-electro machines, majority of which have been licensed and utilized by both start-up and multinational companies. The three start-up companies Bulovic co-founded jointly employ over 400 people, and include Ubiquitous Energy, Inc., developing nanostructured solar technologies, Kateeva, Inc., focused on development of printed electronics, and QD Vision, Inc. (acquired in 2016) that produced quantum dot optoelectronic components. Products of these companies have been used by millions. Bulovic was the first Associate Dean for Innovation of the School of Engineering and the Inaugural co-Director of MIT’s Innovation Initiative, which he co-led from 2013 to 2018. For his passion for teaching Bulovic has been recognized with the MacVicar Fellowship, MIT’s highest teaching honor. He completed his Electrical Engineering B.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton University.

Aline Oliveira (Traive)

Aline co-founded Traive in 2018, an agriculture finance platform that uses artificial intelligence and technology to increase the access of farmers to better loans and help lenders to invest in credit portfolios that meet their risk-return preference. She is the Chief of AI & Product Strategy of Traive. Aline holds a master’s in management and technology and a data analytics certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has worked for large companies leading areas of technological innovation, including Indigo and Cargill. She was honored to be included in the MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 under 35 innovators, and she was considered by Forbes as one of the most influential women in Brazilian agribusiness.

Sridhar Iyengar (Elemental Machines)

Sridhar is a serial entrepreneur in connected medical devices and wearables, Sridhar is focused on strategy and management at Elemental Machines. Previously, Sridhar was a founder and director of Misfit, makers of elegant wearable products, which was acquired by Fossil in 2015. Prior to Misfit, he founded AgaMatrix, a blood glucose monitoring company that made the world’s first medical device connecting directly to the iPhone. AgaMatrix shipped 15+ FDA-cleared medical products, 2B+ biosensors, 6M+ glucose meters, with partnerships with Apple, Sanofi, and Walgreens. Sridhar holds over 30 US and international patents and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar.

Tim Miano (MIT Innovation Headquarters)

Tim is a professional innovator, serial entrepreneur, lecturer, and startup mentor. He designs, builds, and runs next-generation innovation infrastructure. In past lives, he studied physics + math, practiced tax law, backpacked around the world, studied music + art, and volunteered for non-profits. His work focuses on designing and implementing innovation systems that allow for interdisciplinary solving of complex problems, with emphasis on human networks, large-scale projects, and team leadership. He analyzes the physical, social, and procedural resources and limitations of dynamic systems of stakeholders, then design and implement interventions that solve important problems.

Ashley Ferguson (Merlin)

Ashley started her career as an FA-18F Weapons Systems Officer in the U.S. Navy. She served for 11 years and deployed in 2011 and 2017 aboard the USS George H.W. Bush in support of Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), New Dawn (Iraq), and Inherent Resolve (Syria/Iraq). She graduated from the U.S. Navy’s Strike Fighter Weapons School (better known as TOPGUN) in 2012 and spent 5 years as a Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor before separating from the service in 2017. Ashley graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2019 with her M.B.A., and worked as an Associate Consultant at the McKinsey & Company Boston office until August 2020. For the past 3 years, she has worked as the Vice President of Business Operations at Merlin, a Boston area frontier technology startup developing software to propel the future of autonomous flight.

Javier Cubas

Javier Cubas has a Ph.D. from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, in the Aerospace Systems, Air Transport and Airports Department. He is associate professor and academic coordinator of the University Master’s Degree in Space Systems (MUSE) at UPM, where he teaches the courses “Space Environment and Mission Analysis” and “Orbital Dynamics and Attitude Control”. He was the technical manager of the Attitude Control Subsystem of the recently launched university satellite UPMSat-2 and designer of its magnetic control law. He also participated in the Systems Engineering and Power Subsystem of this satellite. Professor Cubas has several publications in the field of controlling the magnetic attitude of small satellites and has been a visiting professor at Ryerson University (2017 Toronto, Canada) and Yale University (2015 New Haven, USA). Currently, he is fellow of the Rafael del Pino Foundation and Visiting Scholar at MIT.

Enrique Gutiérrez

Enrique holds a PhD in Numerical Methods in engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña. He is currently an assistant professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, fellow of the Rafael del Pino Foundation and Visiting Scholar at MIT. He has led several supercomputing projects at international level and participated in various high-impact scientific articles. He has made numerous international stays in prestigious centers (among others, INRIA and Trinity College Dublin). He has musical training in algorithmic composition and modern music. He currently combines teaching at the university with his research in Numerical Methods and Music Information Retrieval: pattern mining and music generation using neural networks.