Friday, MIT Sloan School of Management will kick off two new labs catering to its Executive MBA students: the Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurial Advantage Lab (IDEA Lab) and the New Executive Thinking for Global Challenges (NEXT Lab).
While the NEXT Lab will focus on solving global challenges we’ll face in the next ten years and beyond, the IDEA Lab’s scope is far more local. The latter will feature 14 projects that will explore the best paths large organizations can take to engage the Boston innovation ecosystem. The IDEA Lab will also serve as an arena in which EMBAs at Sloan can work on their own startups or help other ventures make their way into the Boston community.
For example, the IDEA Lab projects will include formulating a playbook for government organizations trying to align themselves with the Boston ecosystem, analyzing diversity programs in place throughout our city and testing potential structures for an EMBA-led angel investment group.
“Building innovation-driven entrepreneurial advantage is deeply embedded in the culture of MIT Sloan and is an intellectual and practical cornerstone of the EMBA program,” Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and professor at MIT Sloan, said in a statement.
Phil Budden, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and co-teacher of the IDEA Lab, said, “This is an exciting opportunity for EMBAs to work with interested organizations, or on their own startups, to explore and leverage innovation ecosystems to build greater strength and more innovation-driven advantage.”
Both the IDEA and NEXT Labs are options for EMBA program's capstone action-learning project, which calls for Sloan students to work out solutions for issues afflicting a real business. In addition to these new labs, Sloan EMBA candidates can go into the Global Organizations Lab (GO-Lab) to complete their final project. All three lab's projects will wrap up in May.
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