MIT’s Welcome Center and Innovation HQ building (beige building at center) sit on the eastern edge of the univerity’s campus, next to a hotel and the Kendall Square MBTA station. Scott Kirsner | MassLive
Innovation will likely not stop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, one program designed to foster it was shut down last week after 12 years in existence.
The head of the MIT Innovation Headquarters Office, Professor Fiona Murray, announced in an email last Thursday that the office would wind down its operations this week. And an Instagram post from earlier in July said that the Innovation HQ and a related “makerspace” prototyping facility, Voxel Lab, “have concluded their work supporting MIT’s innovation community.”
This month’s closure was related to budget cuts at MIT triggered by reductions in federal research funding, MIT spokesperson Abby Abazorious said. Those cuts, she wrote via email, “resulted in targeted program reductions, including the closure of … the MIT Innovation Headquarters within the School of Engineering.” (In March, MIT President Sally Kornbluth detailed some of the ways the university was seeking to reduce its budget in a letter.)
At a university renowned for its scientific research and startup formation, the Innovation Headquarters was not the highest-profile initiative on campus, but it regularly published reports on the impact of its work.
It was created in 2013 as the MIT Innovation Initiative by then-MIT President Rafael Reif, with support from Murray, Michael Cima and several other professors, as an “experiment in place-making and institutional coordination,” according to the email Murray wrote. One goal was to create a collaboration space where students, faculty, staff and outside partners could develop new ideas across different disciplines. The group also organized events related to innovation in a renovated industrial building that opened in 2021.
That building, which provides space for student clubs as well as some MIT-based nonprofits, such as the Desphande Center for Technological Innovation and the Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship, will remain open.
Several staff positions were cut as a result of the closure, but Abazorious didn’t provide specifics on the number of jobs eliminated.
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About the Authors
Scott Kirsner
Scott Kirsner has spent over 25 years working as a business journalist and contributing editor at numerous publications and is a regular contributor on WBUR. He has covered many Mass. companies on their journey from startup to IPO. He helped start several regional conferences, and co-founded a Boston-based company and a non-profit organization.
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