Holy Cow, We Got a Lot of Ship Done in 2024!!!

Warning: If you think you are going to read about yourself in this post, let me warn you it’s highly unlikely. Doesn’t mean we do not love you but there was just an overwhelming amount of great (entrepreneur)Ship that happened in 2024.

Here are my top 10 items. It was painful to leave many things off this list.

1. EDP:  Every year starts with EDP (MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program) in January and like a fine wine, it just gets better with age. It never lets us down. Turns out that bringing dozens of great entrepreneurs from over 25 countries and regions around the world to MIT for a fully in-person immersive experience to build a business plan—if not the beginnings of a company—is simultaneously terrifying, exhilarating and life-changing. It forces us to up our game each year and get off to a fast start. If you have ever been to it, you know what I am talking about and if you haven’t, you should.
2. The passing of a Legend – Ed Roberts: In February, after the start of classes, we were hit with the heaviest item of the year and much longer. It was incredibly sad but also inevitable. The founder of the field of research-based innovation-driven entrepreneurship, Ed Roberts, passed away peacefully and quickly with his family at his side (thankfully) at the age of 88.  To say he led a full life of professional and personal accomplishment is an understatement of the highest order. He was truly a generational figure and a legend. He was also my mentor and giving a eulogy for him was such an honor and also one of the toughest things I have ever had to do but it helped the healing process. His legacy lives on every day and just grows.
3. Raise the Bar for Entrepreneurship Education:  It was also in February and March that we committed to do our best to raise the quality (or “bar”) for innovation-driven entrepreneurship education not just at MIT but more broadly. We had been working on this for a while but now we publicly put our markers down and started to deliver.  See the LinkedIn post here that kicked it off.
4. OMG, The New DE Books Launch and They Take Off:  April saw the launch of two new books (in one month doubling what we had produced in the previous 14 years). The books got exceptionally positive receptions from the community. First was the Expanded and Updated Disciplined Entrepreneurship which incorporated 10 years of lessons learned since the original as well as changes in the field, market and technology. It immediately became a multiweek national bestseller in the US, which is mind-blowing for a textbook. The second and equally exciting is MIT Senior Lecturer Paul Cheek’s book Disciplined Entrepreneurship Startup Tactics. I have taught with Paul for many years now—he also has his own course on this topic—and let me be clear, no one does it better. The book reflects his expertise and, as with the Expanded and Update DE book, there are robust online teaching materials available to help educators. DE Startup Tactics also quickly shot up the best-selling list on Amazon and continues to thrive. It will become another evergreen resource for entrepreneurs and was the first expansion in the DE series, with more to come. Releasing just one of these books in a year would have been a huge success, but having both made it an epically great year for high-quality content.
5. delta v 2024:  As spring starts, so does the delta v planning, and this year we had an exceptional leadership team with Jenny Larios Berlin, Macauley Kenney, and Ben Soltoff, as well as Stephanie MacConnell in NYC, heading up our operations there … and did they ever get it done.  Much like EDP, every year it seems like an impossible hill to climb and every year it gets done better. We had a wonderful cohort again this year and the final presentations were the highest-level quality ever.  But that was not the end, because this year an extra month was added for the teams intending to raise money, with programming focused on financial literacy and other topics. While this was the second year of the program, it reached a whole new level; the teams have been raising money at an unprecedented rate and are clearly more investor-ready.
6. JetPack Takes Off:  Maybe one of the most unexpected and profound changes that happened this year was the emergence of the Generative AI tool JetPack on the Orbit platform.  While we have been working to develop and deploy the Orbit MIT Entrepreneurship AI co-pilot for almost six years now and have achieved significant MIT student participation (over 25% of the entire student body), we still were searching for the killer app that would make Orbit an app that students would log onto daily.  The hiring of the great Doug Williams helped solve that.  Doug worked with Paul Cheek to figure out how to use GenAI and our well-structured and proven DE content to create JetPack tools to guide students, or really any entrepreneurs, through the process of creating a first draft business plan in hours rather than weeks or months.  We were using this in class but it really blew up when Shari Van Cleave posted a video on how she was using it for her startup.  While this story started years ago, it exploded this year. It definitely will change the future of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship in general in ways that we can’t even fathom yet. Stay tuned for much, much more.
7. Complete Revamp of Introductory Entrepreneurship Course for MBAs (15.360): While I love all of my courses, the one course that stood out in 2024 to me was the overhaul of the introductory entrepreneurship seminar for MBAs at MIT Sloan. For years, this course has been a problem, and it was believed it could not be fixed. The target customer taking the class in the first semester was just too broad and we did not have enough time to really deal effectively with all the different constituencies in it. Well in 2024 we took this challenge head-on and used our own techniques. Tons of primary market research. Lots of brainstorming new potential solutions. Experimentation. While the final product was far from perfect, we started everyone off together and then offered alternative paths in the second half of the semester. We incorporated the aforementioned JetPack, Orbit, and other AI tools to help. The class had a record 200 students in it (half of the MBA class at MIT Sloan) and while it was messy at times, I am confident that we have a new blueprint to succeed going forward and we are definitely trending in the right direction.  This is a bit of inside MIT Sloan baseball but those in the course know and it is important to integrate the valuable MBAs with the other entrepreneurial resources at MIT.
8. Serbian Workshop:  While I rarely do workshops abroad anymore, when the Chief Innovation Officer at MIT requests me to do it, I listen and respond. Anantha Chandrakasan hosted a team from Serbia interested in ensuring their major investment in biotechnology would have positive economic and other types of impact so their minister requested a week-long onsite workshop. Honestly, I did everything I could to get out of this but in the end, gave in reluctantly. I must say, it was a lot of work but one of the highlights of the year.  To go to a new place under a lot of pressure to deliver was a big challenge. They had the technical expertise but business commercialization was not at the same level.  We got off to a bit of a rocky start but by the end of the week, our team had made huge progress and feel that there will be a new generation of entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe that will pay lasting dividends. Plus, it was fun because it was during the heat of the Olympics, and the US and Serbian basketball teams were the two best and going head-to-head against each other. It also showed the power of our community in Europe to come together. See a link here for more and some other thoughts at the Summer Solstice.
   

   

9. CCNY: As economic disparities in our society grow and social mobility and access to opportunity decrease, it creates more and more frustration for someone like me to see this taken away, because it is exactly how I got to where I am today.  Being able to get a great education, including in entrepreneurship and AI, seems to be something we should not limit but make more available to all. Towards this end I could not be more proud of what we are doing with CCNY and what we announced this year. Two great but highly complementary institutions coming together to help solve a problem.  Like other items above, this will have long-term ramifications and profoundly change many young people’s lives for years to come.  Huge kudos to Vince Boudreau, Georgia Perakis, Anantha Chandrakasan, Stephanie MacConnell, Chris Bobko, and Will Blodgett as well as the many others who helped make this inspirational program happen.
10. Climate and Clean Energy Entrepreneurship: This has been an area of focus since I started at MIT in 2006 but recently with the addition of Ben Soltoff as an EIR focused on this area, we have been able to make enormous progress and it just keeps growing exponentially.  It also helped to have Tod Hynes join us as a Senior Advisor. This year saw the fruits of this labor. The TEX-E program became an established juggernaut with the fabulous David Pruner at the helm. It was a year marked by better integration of the MIT Climate and Clean Energy student efforts, not just with TEX-E (Fellows and Internship programs) but also internally at MIT with a new high point for the MIT Clean Energy Prize and poised for another in 2025.  The year ended with an announcement on how our center was reestablishing our connections to Greentown Labs (which spun out of the Trust Center originally) to grow the tree’s roots deeper to make it bigger going forward.  Watch this space with a lot more to come including a new “Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures” book in 2025.

Those are the top ten from my perspective. I had to leave out a lot unfortunately like the Faculty Founder Initiative Cohort 2, our exciting growing relationship with the Deshpande Center to improve Lab to Market process and outcomes, the emerging Global Entrepreneurship Educators Network launching in January 2025, work with Jaylen Brown and Jrue and Lauren Holiday to improve entrepreneurial outcomes for underrepresented groups in Boston, helping host and participate in GCEC with old friend Donna Levin in Boston this year (including talks by Daniela Ruiz Massieu and Paul Cheek), great trips to Notre Dame with Chuck Kane, Milan Polytech with Alex Fracassi, talk in New Hampshire to 603 Business, all the classes and all the people and so much more… But don’t get mad, just remind an old guy what he forgot below.

But now, on to 2025. Happy New Year everyone and best wishes for a healthy, prosperous, and fun year and let’s make more Good Ship Happen!