Innovation at MIT

SHEFFI: You know, vision is the ability to take an invention and bring it to the marketplace, to actually for an invention to make a difference.

HOCKFIELD: The economy grows mainly through just this kind of technological and related innovation. What are the next near ready innovation waves? What are the industry's business that we should be looking to that will actually drive this kind of fundamental growth in the next decade?

STERN: Universities don't just produce students, and don't just produce knowledge. They produce the ability to build cumulative innovation systems within their local environment.

DONNELLY: Students are some of the first people to get excited about these kind of issues and get involved.

THOMAS: The result is a lot of student startups and excitement in terms of innovation and creating new technologies to try to solve hard problems.

COONEY: And the problems that we face are big problems. The energy problems, supply, efficiency, security, the global aspects, health care, affordability, unmet needs, access, it's a global problem.

BERGER: We all recognize that the stakes are very high. We're in the middle of an economic crisis, which is destroyed millions of jobs, many of which may never return.

AULET: And we have to change it by innovating our way out of this as we have through so many other crises we've had in the past. This is just another one. And so the way out of this is not just by working harder, but by innovating, working smarter as well.

LO: Financial infrastructure is absolutely essential for innovation.

VEST: Investment, and research, and advanced education in the sciences and engineering had a very strong import for our national future.

BELCHER: We need to keep investing IN these basic science innovations because we're going to break the challenges for how long it takes to get materials to commercialization.

VEST: And that it is not just about what project goes to the University of Illinois or what goes to Washington. It is how does the innovation system in the nation work?

BERGER: So what I think we can hope for if we realize our vision of moving innovation more rapidly into the economy, is a society in which a surge of growth and productivity could take place that would pull up everybody.

HOCKFIELD: So for the United States to return to fundamental and lasting economic growth, and to set off in a path that we hope will create somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million new jobs, we're going to need new innovation-based growth. And I believe that it's the only credible path out of our current recession.

AULET: It's our mission. We want to bring our knowledge to bear on the world's greatest challenges. And that's what we're doing.