iTeams logo with drawings of Tim the Beaver by Owen Breva. Used with permission.
iTeams: The Original Deep Tech Innovation Factory and Venture Builder
What if technologies were like untapped superpowers—and your job was to find out how to use them to solve problems that matter?
iTeams started as an experiment in 2007, and since then, it’s become one of the best-kept open secrets at MIT and one that transcends department silos to serve all of MIT with a home in the School of Engineering (10.807, 2.907) and the Sloan School of Management (15.371). Over time, it has become the source of inspiration for many new concepts like venture building, innovation factories, combinatorial innovation, tech shelf, and technology repurposing. Chances are you’ve heard about an idea or a concept for how to make advanced technology work to solve problems for real that was first coined and experimented with as part of iTeams.
Since Luis first re-set iTeams (in 2007) we’ve overseen more than 200 projects and we’ve learned of about 40 new high technology companies founded from the work in the class: OpenWater from Mechanical Engineering (course 2), Eta Wireless and Eta Devices from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (course 6,) and Manus Bio from courses 10 and 20, are just some early examples that have already gone full cycle. In just under 7 years, these examples generated transactions north of half a billion dollars, which would translate to a combined valuation north of $2B.
Building innovators, moving technology to impact, building companies, not just startups.
The system we developed in iTeams would feel at home inside a corporation, or a new model of private equity, venture capital, or as a source of continuous competitive advantage in large technology corporations. Indeed, it’s been adapted to work in some of them. But its obvious commercial potential notwithstanding, iTeams at MIT has remained faithful to its mission to stay first and foremost an educational experience that prepares our students to succeed.
By “loaning us” a technology project, PIs help us teach students how to move technology out of the lab and into the world. The class remains one of the best-kept MIT open secrets. We keep it small so PIs and students can explore impact freely (without speculation). In that way we are very different from most “startup-making” classes and the class is uniquely MIT.
iTeams is unique and different. We care about exploring together a path to meaningful impact that leverages deep tech to do well by doing good. It is about building real companies and organizations (new or existing),
iTeams is different from entrepreneurship offerings to which it is often compared. Typically, entrepreneurship and innovation classes require that you bring your own product idea, with which you imagine a product and pretend-play pitching to investors and others. We have no such requirement. We start from an MIT technology or from a problem in need of solving.
In iTeams, all you have at the outset is uncertainty, everything is a variable, and your job is to make decisions that reduce both uncertainty and risk. No other innovation or entrepreneurship class teaches you how to explore opportunities and scale up organizations without a pre-conceived product idea.
We’ll show you how to explore several possible “destinations” at once, and how to take technology to society to solve a problem that’s meaningful, not just one that presents a product opportunity. Doing so is a significant scale-up endeavor driven by a desire to build systems that don’t fail in ways that could have been predicted. We’ll teach you how to home in on the skill of advancing by being productively wrong. You’ll learn to explore whitespaces and plan robust, de-risked, trailblazing organizations that solve problems that matter.
In iTeams, you’ll put to the test some deeply held beliefs about entrepreneurship and innovation. We will show you a different way to use the skills and knowledge you acquire in your disciplinary training.
Video Introduction and Modules
Prof. Perez-Breva gives an overview of Innovation Teams (iTeams) and explains how the iTeams approach differs from traditional entrepreneurship models in this series of short videos.
Want to Know More Now?
Check out some of our thought leadership:
- A writing about teaching in the pandemic in the MIT Faculty Newsletter
- A response to NSF’s request for input about how to extract more value from technology
How MIT Students Learn About the Class
This course introduces skills and capabilities for real-world problem-solving to take technology from lab to societal impact: technical and functional exploration, opportunity discovery, market understanding, value economics, scale-up, intellectual property, and communicating/working for impact across disciplines. Students work in multidisciplinary teams formed around MIT research breakthroughs, with extensive in-class coaching and guidance from faculty, lab members, and select mentors. It follows a structured approach to innovating in which everything is a variable, and the product, technology, and opportunities for new ventures can be seen as an act of synthesis. Teams gather evidence that permits a fact-based iteration across multiple application domains, markets, functionalities, technologies, and products, leading to a recommendation that maps a space of opportunity and includes actionable next steps to evolve the market and technology.
Do you wonder how technology makes it out of the lab?
What if technology were like a raw superpower and your job were to find out how to reshape it and scale it up to solve problems that matter? Innovation Teams is MIT’s original deep technology to Impact innovation factory, and the longest-running class exploring how technologies move out of MIT.
In iTeams, you learn the skills through a combination of practice, lectures, and experience while working with an actual MIT breakthrough coming from one of our partner MIT research groups and labs.
In this course, MIT students:
- work with a multidisciplinary team on an actual MIT technology project coming from an MIT lab, or on a problem in need of technology
- 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
- 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
- present their findings to members of our innovation ecosystem
- present their findings to an entire middle school and inspire the next generation
Contrary to what most seem to assume, you’re not luring investors every time you explain a project. If your project is truly worth your time, the so-called “elevator pitch” will be the rarest of the presentations you’ll do. If you prepare to describe your concept genuinely through storytelling, and you assume your audience’s questions will not just be motivated by gauging a potential investment, you’ll succeed at presenting every time. Even investors will be compelled to ask questions that are better for you. That’s what our daring 2020 students got to practice while inspiring nearly 300 middle schoolers. It was so wildly successful, we did it again in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Acknowledgments
This online version of our course would have been impossible without the support, persistence, and help of Hanna Adeyema, Mariah Rawding, Scott Cooper, Erin Breva, Owen Breva, Shiba Nemat-Nasser, Fundación Rafael del Pino, Marta Ortega-Valle, Christopher Holland, Simmy Willemann, Jose Estabil, and the nearly 1000 MIT students and faculty who have participated in this great experiment since 2007.
