Featuring Luis Perez-Breva, PhD, faculty director of MIT Innovation Teams, School of Engineering and Sloan 

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The fear of “missing out” leads many to conflate entrepreneurship and innovation: enterprising minds are urged to “fail fast”, rushed to analyze present markets, and encouraged to pitch unicorns.  Innovating can be about something other than making an idea look disruptive, earth-shattering, or exponential before you even start. You can aim for meaningful impact. Entrepreneurship is about creating new companies, innovating is about solving real world problems and progress.

We are hoping to empower aspiring innovators to be bolder and take aim at greater ideas—the kind that truly develop economies. And we are looking forward to engaging with MIT alumni to learn how to make the conversation about innovation more inclusive of a doer mentality. Come discuss with us. 

the conversation, here are a few ideas about innovation everyone gets wrong:

• Innovation is the outcome, it is neither a process nor a product.
• Accepting your first version will be a long ways from fulfilling your vision, is no reason for settling on a minimally viable product.
• Good ideas start out bad. Accelerating bad ideas so they can be pitched is nonsense. What ideas need is changing until you understand the problem you’re solving.
• There is no evidence supporting the widely held belief that being more “entrepreneurial” will lead large corporations to innovation. Innovation and entrepreneurship aren’t the same thing. A new company is not automatically a stepping stone to innovation. It is just a new company.
• Many paint innovators as if possessing a special “gene”, … that’s a dangerous proposition. Innovating and Entrepreneurship is something we ought to teach well so you can practice it and become better at it if you are so inclined.

Luis Perez-Breva, PhD (http://linkedin.com/in/lpbreva) is the author of "Innovating” (MIT Press 2017, http://innovatingthebook.com) and an expert in the process of technology innovation and an entrepreneur.  He directs the MIT Innovation Teams Program, MIT’s flagship hands-on joint innovation program between the Schools of Engineering and Management. He has taught innovating as a skill worldwide to professionals and students from all disciplines.

He is a serial innovator bringing Artificial Intelligence to solve real world problems with successes like the system for emergency cell phone location technologies currently deployed worldwide. 

Dr. Perez-Breva holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Physics, Business, and Artificial Intelligence from leading universities in Spain, France, and the US (MIT).  In 2011, his career achievements were recognized by the Spanish government when he was awarded the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain.