A GLOBAL STRATEGY FOR MIT • 19
• In innovation, MIT’s focus on entrepreneurship-based innovation pathways is
helping to accelerate the conversion of discoveries and inventions into practical
technologies, products and services, and this in turn is adding new dimensions to the
Institute’s interactions with the world. For example:
• The opportunity to participate in the local innovation ecosystem is attracting
large international firms to MIT’s Cambridge neighborhood, including Phillips,
Novartis, Samsung, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Schlumberger, Toyota, GlaxoSmithKline,
and others.
• MIT entrepreneurship ‘bootcamps’, intense short courses taught in conjunction
with online entrepreneurship education programs, are bringing new kinds of
students to campus from all over the world, and are also being oered in other
locations where MIT is active, including Singapore and Abu Dhabi.
• MIT’s Hong Kong Innovation Node is designed to enrich the educational experi-
ences of MIT (and Hong Kong) students in important areas of innovation practice
including entrepreneurship, making, rapid prototyping, and scale-up. The Node,
part of the broader eort to build out a global classroom for MIT students, will
provide a gateway for students to access the unique manufacturing and proto-
typing capabilities of Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta region.
As MIT continues to elaborate and extend the model of the impact-driven research university, new
opportunities for international engagement will undoubtedly arise.
Changes in the World. America’s relative economic weight in the world has been declining for
decades, and as other countries grow more prosperous, a growing share of global R&D is originating
outside the U.S. While domestic funding for R&D has increased by 11% since 2008, R&D funding
in China has been growing at an average annual rate of nearly 17%, and by more than 9% per year
in South Korea.
11
The U.S. is still the world leader in research, accounting for 29% of total R&D
spending by the G20 countries in 2013 (the most recent year for which data are available), but
China, which two decades ago barely registered in the international statistics, accounted for the
next largest share of R&D investment at 22% of the total.
12
Indeed, by this measure, China will soon
overtake the U.S. (Researchers in China already publish almost as many articles in peer-reviewed
scientific and engineering journals as their U.S. counterparts.
13
) As MIT faculty and students look
for funding to tackle some of the world’s biggest scientific and technological challenges they are
increasingly likely to find it in foreign capitals. Similarly, as economic growth in the developing
world continues to outpace growth in the U.S., more of the world’s most dynamic companies—
typically the most attractive industrial partners for MIT—will be based in the emerging economies.
14
11 In the U.S., gross expenditures on R&D grew from $415 billion in 2008 to $463 billion in 2015 (in constant dollars). Over the same
period gross R&D spending rose from $149 billion to $377 billion in China (using PPP exchange rates) (Source: OECD (2017), gross
domestic spending on R&D (indicator). doi: 10.1787/d8b068b4-en (accessed on 05 March 2017)).
12 The G20 countries account for about 85% of gross world product and most of the world’s R&D expenditures.
13 National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators – 2016, pp. 5-8.
14 According to a recent projection by McKinsey, 45% of the world’s largest companies will be based in emerging economies by 2025,
compared with just 5% at the beginning of the century. The list of the world’s 500 largest companies published annually by Fortune
magazine now includes 156 emerging-market firms, compared with just 18 in 1995. (Economist, 17 September 2016.)