MIT-Portugal Program (MPP): Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education

MIT Portugal Program (MPP) set out to make its contribution to Portuguese Engineering towards innovation, entrepreneurship and industry linkages on a broad front. All education tracks include mandatory components in the economic and business aspects of engineering, as well as training in policy, innovation management, and leadership. Seventy-one new courses were developed jointly by MIT and Portuguese faculty specifically for the program. Program assessment has shown that MPP students ascribe to their program a much higher industry and entrepreneurial orientation, a stronger education in economics and business, more contact on a working level with industry engineers and scientist, and more course teaching by faculty from industry than peer students in other graduate engineering program at Portuguese universities.

For many students the innovation, entrepreneurship and industry focus of the program is a key for their application decisions. Approximately half of the MPP PhD students enter the program with prior work experience in industry, especially industrial R&D, and another third has other private sector work experience, which is about 50% higher than in comparable PhD programs in Portugal.

The MIT Portugal Program targets test bed development and demonstrations. We envision Portugal as a scalable “living laboratory” and model for the world. We are designing, testing, and implementing systems, new products and modeling capabilities for markets worldwide.

For example, MIT Portugal’s sustainable energy focus area is working to transform the archipelago of the Azores into a living laboratory for testing innovative technologies to be developed by Portuguese companies, where with the support of MIT and Portuguese researchers in association with the local government and enterprises 75% of the energy production should come from renewable sources by 2018. Furthermore, the small island of Corvo will soon become self-sufficient in generating production, with the wind and the sun as its main resources. This model has great potential to be used in other isolated islands throughout the world, and ultimately will be a small scale representation of the Earth itself, thus leveraging the capacity of Portuguese companies to export products and services worldwide. The project has as its main non-academic partner the Government of the Azores, a key institutional support for its implementation. Energia dos Açores (EDA) is also a key partner due to its position in the islands. However, the dimension and the high industrial and export potential of this project provides for many other industrial partners, such as EDP, EFACEC, GALP and Novabase, among others.

One of the changes that shall happen in the archipelago is the adoption of Electrical Vehicles as the main mean of transportation in the islands. Although the development of EVs in the Azores shall happen much faster than in the continent and in other parts of the world, though, these will soon replace the current oil drinking automobiles. Therefore, besides being a part of the Green Islands project, their use is under study by other research. Their impacts on the grid and in the reduction of CO2 levels are being assessed, and the productions of soft and hard interfaces to allow for plug and play capability are under development. Business and regulatory models to explore this new reality are under study, with high go to market potential.

The Portuguese industry is therefore a partner of this project, with EDP, EFACEC, GALP and ISA being involved.