Understanding that relevant publications have already been produced specifically on the entrepreneurship phenomenon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we could not fail to open the case study with those publications.
Etzkowitz (2003), in his book “MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science,” describes the historical process of building MIT as a scientific and entrepreneurial role model. Briefly, this historical process can be read in the following stages: (i) the idealization of the Institute and its applicability-oriented mission, being a land grant university model, and its debates heading to an industry permeable modus operandi (the controversy surrounding the consulting activities practiced by teachers being one of the best representations of this); (ii) the intensification of research activities and the relevance growth of MIT at World War periods—highlighting the Institute’s ability to respond to governmental demands with agility and to organize strong resources for effective technological development; and (iii) finding the commercial value of research, unfolding into the creation of regulations, institutional actors, good practices, and the emergence of corporations, spin offs, and the New England entrepreneurial ecosystem in general. The book highlights one of the positions of MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers, in his period of idealization of the Institute:
“In a carefully thought out charter document written in 1846, Rogers wrote that: ‘There is no branch of practical industry, whether in the arts of construction, manufactures or agriculture, which is not capable of being better practiced, and even of being improved in its processes through the knowledge of its connections with physical truths and laws and therefore we would add that there is no class of operatives to whom the teaching of science may not become of direct and substantial utility and material usefulness.” (Etzkowitz 2003, p. 21)
Other studies have been developed around understanding MIT’s ecosystem, some with more attention to the historical process and the evolution of MIT numbers (Roberts et al. 2015; Roberts and Eesley 2011), while others sought to dissect the practices of the Institute to better understand the agents involved and good practices in general (O’Shea et al. 2007; Lüthje and Franke 2002; Jansen et al. 2015). For O’Shea et al. (2007), eight factors underlie MIT’s success in venture creation: (i) science and engineering resource base, (ii) industry funding of research, (iii) quality of faculty, (iv) organizational characteristics, (v) university mission, (vi) faculty culture, (vii) history and tradition, and (viii) MIT’s location. More recently, Hayter et al. (2017) proposed an analysis on the role of graduate students in the development of MIT’s spinoffs, and their assessment about the lack of studies on entrepreneurship education led us to build this article.
Data analysis on entrepreneurship education at MIT
Our research immersion was aimed to understand the MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem, especially the way that programs and services are designed to foster entrepreneurship education inside the campus. With the data collected, we saw an interesting pattern on entrepreneurship education: a set of efforts that are being made to build a “builder mindset” in students. In this builder mindset, we have entrepreneurial competencies, science, and engineering knowledge, a culture of discovery and experimentation and a solid foundation of work ethics. We then separate our data in three main educational unfoldings: classrooms, complementary activities, and real-life entrepreneurship support. The topics below present a deepening of the data.
Project-oriented classes and the role of MIT’s professors
Although much has been said that entrepreneurship cannot be taught in classrooms, some important aspects of training an innovative and entrepreneurial MIT student happens “inside” classrooms (that expands to the whole campus and beyond). The big difference lies in the way that technological entrepreneurship competencies are built. In our research, we realize that the Institute has been a pioneer in building project-oriented classes that stimulate teamwork, mastering advanced tools, and systemic thinking in product building or organizational development.
The role of teachers demonstrated to be very important in this innovative approach at MIT classes. Generally speaking, the interviewees emphasized this project-based approach to education—usually with classes that are very oriented to building things and with a large volume of activities held in laboratories and workshops. In both undergraduate and graduate disciplines, there is also a cultural element to be highlighted: the involvement and passion of teachers in building things, reinforcing the motto of hands and minds working together (mens et manus). For an in-depth analysis, some of the courses cited in interviews received more attention, with information also collected from institutional materials. The most emphasized in interviews are explored below.
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How To Make (almost) Anything (MAS.863): This course is one of the most coveted at MIT due to its “free and fun” hands-on approach. Students here can develop their own projects without any judgment of commercial viability or market desirability. For these projects, digital manufacturing concepts are introduced to students, which include the use of rapid prototyping tools, equipment, and machines such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and milling cutters. During the semester, students also have to build a website to register the project development notes and lessons learned.
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How to Make Something that Makes (almost) Anything (MAS.S62): This course aims to show students that they can build their own machines that are capable to build what they need. Throughout the course, the students also develop a machine project, and most parts of the activities are held at MIT’s fab labs and workshops.
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Product Engineering Process (2.009): Students form large teams to solve a problem and receive all necessary support and resources (including $5000 for materials, a team of instructors, and access to laboratories) to construct a technological product that will be presented at the end of the semester at a grand event for an audience of more than a thousand people and online broadcasting. Despite the high workload and difficulty level of the course, it stands out among the students as a fun course. During the semester, various competitions are held in and outside the classroom, ranging from dismantling a product to create a panel of components and their suppliers to immerse themselves in another reality with garden-set scenarios to build a vehicle. Being a comprehensive class, students learn prototyping, physical construction, project management, communication, and design.
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Tangible interfaces (MAS.834): Course content explores man-machine interaction and discussion of materials engineering. During the first hour of class, the teacher brings a special guest who, in addition to publicizing their projects in the area, explains where their motivations came from and the ideas for these projects. According to one interviewee, these contents collaborate showing to students that it is possible to find other applications for the same technology or showing that failures are part of the process of being innovative.
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New enterprises (15.3901): Aims to educate the student as an entrepreneur through practical activities such as “Take an Entrepreneur to Dinner” where students need to access and interview an entrepreneur and develop a business model. Its content follows the steps of MIT’s Professor Bill Aulet book—“The Disciplined Entrepreneurship” (Aulet 2013).
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Science Fiction to Science Fabrication (MAS S95): This course explores creativity through science fiction films and books. For example, students need to watch Star Wars and find specific insights about technologies from that universe, predicting potential problems caused by such technologies—and its reflections should be supported by real data. The course was presented as a great exercise of critical and innovative thinking.
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Start MIT: A 2-week course offered during the independent activity period of January in which students are introduced to the Boston and Cambridge entrepreneurship ecosystem and also to programs and opportunities offered by MIT. In addition, it contains inspirational activities such as lectures and talks with entrepreneurs and hands-on activities where students work on their own projects with mentorship support.
In this sense, we have conceptual learning through reading materials, lectures and project research, and a lot of instrumental learning using machines or creating new technologies. Other competencies, such as resilience, focus, creativity, problem solving, and teamwork also showed up very frequently in our data.
Experience-based learning through individual exploration
Since the proposal of experience-based learning is behavior change that happens when the student goes through some kind of concrete experience and reflects on the conflicts generated by it (Kolb 1984), it is important to note the role of complementary activities in the education of an MIT student. An important premise of the Institute is that the student discovers itself through the experimentation of several activities, giving him autonomy in the choice of their experiences. One thing to note is the institution’s policy of “pass or no record” in freshman year. Aiming at the process of autonomous discovery, first-year students can enroll in a variety of courses and activities—and if the consequences of poor choices result in failed grades, this does not appear in his academic record or affects his GPA. The positive impact of this policy has already been presented in another study discussing innovation training (Newman and Amir 2001).
As a result of fostering student autonomy and supporting entrepreneurship movements, several organisms came to life on campus. The university atmosphere is rich with experience-based learning opportunities such as:
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Student-led clubs: organization of robotics competitions, entrepreneurship clubs, community support groups, student performance groups, and a host of other groups in which students can engage. These opportunities, by having a strong emphasis on self- management skills, not only offer expertise related to the group, but also skills related to leadership, team management, finance, and other management-related skills. These are grassroots movements and are said to have a great impact on the entrepreneurial orientation of the Institute.
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Events: hackathons, conferences, lectures, business plan competitions, seminars, open lecture programs, open classes, and others are all composing the vibrant atmosphere within MIT. According to the interviews, every week there is a different event with a different theme, usually involving interesting people (leaders of big technology companies) and good sponsors—which is also interesting for professional networking.
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Research projects: in addition to the student activities and events, the broad scope of the research projects was highlighted. As a result of the quality and volume of research conducted by MIT, the opportunity to work with any topic that interests you—usually in departments that are at the frontier of research on the subject—is also considered a key aspect of the students’ complementary development.
One of the important aspects of these opportunities is that the student is engaging in activities that he enjoys. It is common to hear that all are busy with several projects, but most of these projects are not related to the formal activities of graduation but rather to parallel activities related to such complementary experiences. The fun involved in such activities, which also often carry high technical demand, is one of the strongest cultural traits perceived in MIT.Footnote 1
In addition, the high-pressure conditions of the compromises assumed by the students (with complementary activities and the high formal requirement in MIT classes) seem to stimulate a sense of community and collaboration among students, which, for one interviewer, was a decisive factor for the choice of the Institute in relation to Ivy League universities. Another example of how this learning through discovery is important at the Institute was found on the motto of MIT’s Media Lab, one of the University’s most highlighted innovative spaces:
“The Media Lab focuses on ‘uniqueness, impact and magic’. What our students and faculty do should be unique. We shouldn’t be doing something that someone else is doing. If someone else starts doing it, we should stop. Everything we do should have impact. Lastly, things should induce us to be passionate and should go beyond incremental thinking. ‘Magic’ means that we take on projects that inspire us. In the Lifelong Kindergarten group, researchers often describe the ‘Four Ps of Creative Learning’ as Projects, Peers, Passion and Play. Play is extremely important for creative learning. There is a great deal of research showing that rewards and pressure can motivate people to ‘produce’, but creative learning and thinking requires the ‘space’ that play creates. Pressure and rewards can often diminish that space, and thus, squash creative thinking.” (Ito 2014)
This discover-focused environment leads to profound experiences that create the learning presented on the experience-based learning theory. In this approach, we found a greater emphasis on attitudinal development due to the autonomous and self-led characteristics of the activities, as well as more instrumental skills development on more technology-driven activities. Students here learn mostly from peers, also learning through personal reflection and specific materials that they discover by themselves.
Active learning building real-life business
A third way of entrepreneurship education at MIT is active learning. In this modality, there is the creation of a real company, and the learning takes place through trial and error, reflection, and feedback loops. While some point out that this is the only way entrepreneurship is taught—and that there is no support mechanism that can help, some studies already refute such skepticism (see the “Introduction” section), and our research complements this refutation. In the context of active learning, some content can help entrepreneurs in moments of reflection but more importantly is the role of mentorship in the construction of the business.
Being able to be summarized with a highlighted phrase in one of the interviews—“I can build whatever I want, whenever I want”—the availability of resources and programs for the creative exploration of students is central to the phenomenon studied. In addition to the various places to build things (MIT has 28 marker spaces and workshops in more than 11,148 m2), the university has a number of organizations supporting entrepreneurship and innovation. These are mechanisms such as the Venture Mentoring Service, Martin Trust Center, and others cited above that give the student greater focus on the central aspects of their startup without worrying about unnecessary bureaucracies or complexities. In these spaces, students can as well access mentors, funding, awards, and business development processes.
Some characteristics of these facilities and spaces were punctuated in the interviews, such as (i) access to laboratories of partner companies, which allows greater access to resources (physical and human) and contact with the demands of the industry; (ii) departmental multidisciplinarity, such as the Stata Center, which involves departments and laboratories in both computer science and linguistics and philosophy; and (iii) formal and informal networks, involving wide access to mentors by official programs, as well as key contacts in informal venues.Footnote 2
The special role of mentors has been highlighted at various times as one of the great elements of MIT’s ecosystem. The Institute is distinguished by its high-level alumni network but also presents unique models in the way of addressing mentoring processes. The first aspect is the differentiation that some programs work on support figures: (i) the role of the mentor, a person who has experience and establishes a voluntary long-term commitment to the program; (ii) the role of the fellow, being a direct support agent who acts as a coach in the development of teams, centered on the process and program guidance; and (iii) the role of the specialists, usually someone in the industry with specific expertise who assists in a specific demand but without a long-term commitment to the teams—their participation being limited to one-on-one visits, office hours, or even video conferencing meetings. We highlight that one of the most cited MIT ecosystem agents in the interviews was the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.
In models such as the Deshpande Center and the Sandbox program, we saw an active participation of specialized consultants such as lawyers, technical experts, industry people, or MIT Technology Licensing Office agents for specific guidance on the feasibility of intellectual property. In the case of the Martin Trust Center, “Resident Entrepreneurs” are responsible for supporting students with ideas at an embryonic stage, being a way to return the support received in the past. The “give back” feeling of the network of trainers is the central factor in the engagement of all these agents, and they actively participate in the ecosystem, often considered an important success factor of some MIT startups. The power of this MIT mentorship ecosystem can be seen in this excerpt from a story of a successful alumni company:
“Now PlenOptika is focused on ramping up production for its primary and secondary markets. But Dave notes MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem was key in helping launch the startup six years ago. The team, then called IOVista, started thinking seriously about commercializing the technology after winning the Segal Family Emerging Markets track prize in the 2012 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service was especially valuable in offering sage advice on founding a company, iterating business models, fleshing out contracts, and fundraising, as well as connecting with potential partners, Dave says. In fact, Dave still reaches out to the VMS mentors for business and personal advice. ‘They’ve mentored us on everything,’ Dave says. ‘I can’t say enough good things about the VMS.’” (Matheson 2018)
For active learning at MIT, the education seems to happen with feedback loops from mentors’ advice and processes guidance. Specifically on support processes, the use of Disciplined Entrepreneur (Aulet 2013), created by an MIT professor and currently used around the world, has been widely used. Mentors educate entrepreneurs sharing concepts through personal experience, as well as shaping behaviors being role models or with specific advice about effective attitudes. In a very technical environment such as MIT, this kind of guidance prove to be very powerful, especially for scientists to learn more about business knowledge, such as marketing strategy, business planning, fundraising, and intellectual property.