MIT offers a wealth of resources for students to immerse themselves in entrepreneurship outside the classroom. The following list of diverse student organizations allow for innovation-focused activities and networking for almost any MIT student interest.

ORGANIZATIONS

Energy & Climate Club

The MIT Energy & Climate Club is one of the largest student-run organizations at MIT with a mission to bring students, professionals, and policymakers together for fact-based analyses of the most pressing challenges in energy.

Entrepreneurs Club

The E-Club was founded in 1988 to serve MIT, Harvard, and Wellesley students, faculty, staff, alumni and select professionals. Members represent a range of experiences and backgrounds including business, engineering, arts, and sciences. Many MIT and Harvard startups have recruited club members as $100K team members, co-founding partners, and equity-sharing employees. The club focuses on helping to develop all aspects of science, engineering, and technology business creation.

FinTech Club

The MIT FinTech Club is a community dedicated to exploring, discussing, and promoting financial technology and innovation at MIT and more broadly in the business world.

Food & Agriculture Club

The MIT Food and Agriculture Club (FAC) brings together students — and other MIT community members — to coordinate and support work in the areas of food and agriculture. The club also sponsors a Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize.

MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum

Founded in 2011 by a group of MIT students, MIT-CHIEF is committed to promoting intellectual exchanges and collaborations between China and the United States in technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. MIT-CHIEF strives to connect the most valuable US-based startups with leading investors, strategic partners, and market access in China.

MIT Entrepreneurship Club

The MIT Entrepreneurship Club (MEC) is MIT’s premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club. MEC is a community of founders and an interface for students who are looking to work at startups. Through MIT’s first startup career fair and various other initiatives, MEC’s mission is to empower MIT undergraduates to dream big and innovate.

Sloan Business Club

The Sloan Business Club, through its Entrepreneurship and Engineering Leadership Focus Group, connects the MIT community with corporate industries as well as start-ups to educate students about how to become successful engineering leaders and entrepreneurs.

Sloan Entrepreneurship Club

The MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Club aims to reignite the spirit of entrepreneurship across the Sloan community and to offer an intimate support system for entrepreneurs and those interested in startups at Sloan.

Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development

The Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development (SEID) is a student-led organization that seeks to drive sustainable global development through entrepreneurship, by fostering productive collaborations between students and new ventures in emerging markets and by raising awareness of current challenges and success models. It is the intersection of international development and entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan.

Sloan Tech Club

The mission of Sloan Tech Club is to connect MIT Sloan’s MBAs with the best companies in the high tech industry around the globe. The Tech Club is not only a place to talk about technology, here students interact directly with the companies, being the first to know about opportunities and learn about the industry.

Sloan Women in Management

Sloan Women in Management (SWIM) works to increase opportunities for all women at MIT Sloan through networking events, speaker series, professional development workshops, and mentorship programs.

StartLabs

StartLabs was founded to give engineers the skills and interests necessary to make something out of nothing, and encourage those engineers to start world-changing companies or join innovative teams at existing companies.

TechX

TechX is a student-run organization that aims to empower MIT students by bringing cutting-edge technology, new ideas, and top tech-innovators to campus. Among the events they produce are HackMIT,  MakeMIT, and xFair.

Venture Capital and Private Equity Club

The mission of the MIT Venture Capital and Private Equity Club (VCPE) is to provide its members with opportunities to learn about the venture capital and private equity industries, to interact with leading professional investors and business executives, and to develop relationships with members of the MIT community who share similar interests.

Waste Alliance

MIT Waste Alliance fosters a forum where students, researchers, entrepreneurs, industrial practitioners, and policy makers can come together, share, and discuss waste-sector issues and innovations. They plan tours and lectures to learn more about waste management.

Water Club

The MIT Water Club is the leading student network for water research and innovation at MIT. The club organizes conferences, lectures, research showcases, and entrepreneurship events to explore the most pressing issues in water technology, policy, and science.

PRIZES & COMPETITIONS

$100K Entrepreneurship Competition

One competition – three independent contests – from September through May. For 25+ years, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition has been bringing together students and researchers from across MIT and Greater Boston to launch their talent, ideas, and technology into leading companies. The competition is run as a series of distinct, increasingly intensive contests: Pitch, Accelerate, and Launch.

ClimateTech & Energy Prize

The MIT Climate & Energy Prize is the longest-running and largest climate tech startup competition for university students. Since 2007, more than 100 CEP alumni have successfully launched companies and collectively raised over $1.1 billion in follow-on funding. CEP@MIT teams compete for a $100,000 Grand Prize and other monetary prizes. The mission is to be the catalyst for climate tech entrepreneurs and startups tackling the net zero challenge.

Creative Arts Competition

This startup competition is designed to encourage arts-focused startups at the Institute. The $15K prize is offered as a grant to help launch the winning enterprise and enable the recipient(s) to join the ranks of MIT’s most successful startup founders.

IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge

The MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge connects students with the passion and talent to improve the world with the experience and resources of the MIT community worldwide. The IDEAS Global Challenge is an annual competition that awards up to $10,000 per team for the best ideas to tackle barriers to well being.

Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize honors promising collegiate inventors around the country. The student prize is open to teams of undergraduate students and individual graduate students who have inventions in categories that represent significant sectors of the economy: healthcare, transportation, food and agriculture, or consumer devices.

FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS

D-Lab Scale-Ups Fellowship Program

The MIT D-Lab Scale-Ups Fellowship offers one year of support to social entrepreneurs bringing hardware-based, poverty-alleviating products and services to market at scale. Alumni of MIT and the International Development Design Summit are eligible to apply. Scale-Ups Fellows receive a $20,000 grant, a set of assigned mentors, skills-building, an annual conference, webinars, tailored resources, and networking opportunities.

Deshpande Center Ignition and Innovation Grants

The Deshpande Center helps MIT faculty and students commercialize breakthrough technologies and inventions by transforming promising ideas at MIT into innovative products and cutting-edge spinout companies. Toward this end, the center makes modest but pivotal investments in research that is being done by some of MIT’s most talented scientists and engineers.

Legatum Center Seed Grant

Seed Grants are available through the generosity of the Legatum Center’s supporters so that MIT students may explore innovation-driven entrepreneurship opportunities in the developing world. Seed Grants fund travel to locations throughout the developing world so students may learn about the local business context, conduct primary market research, and pilot prototypes. By supporting early stage entrepreneurial leaders at MIT, the Seed Grant program enables students to experience opportunities on the ground with the hope that award recipients will address real challenges and create solutions that have the potential to drive economic and social progress across the developing world.

Legatum Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Leadership at MIT

Every year, the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT builds a cohort of approximately 20 highly motivated entrepreneurial leaders from MIT who are accelerating progress in the developing world through their innovation-driven ventures. During this one-year fellowship, students focus on building and scaling their innovative product or service “on the ground” as well as building the necessary knowledge, capabilities, mindset, and networks to ensure maximum impact and a sustainable future.

Sandbox Innovation Fund

MIT Sandbox (short for MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program) provides meaningful seed funding of up to $25,000 for student-initiated ideas, mentoring from within MIT and from a broad network of committed partners, and tailored educational experiences.

Student Group Collaboration Grant

The MIT Innovation Initiative Student Group Collaboration Grant (MITii SGC Grant)  encourages partnerships between innovation and entrepreneurship focused student groups. Grants will support diverse student groups who are working together on an event or project that will have impact on the E&I ecosystem here at MIT.

Tata Center Graduate Fellowship Program

Candidates for Fellowships must have strong technical backgrounds with an interest in design, entrepreneurship, and developing countries, and must be admitted to, or currently enrolled in, eligible MIT graduate level degree programs.

Translational Fellows Program

The Translational Fellows Program (TFP) is a competitive, nomination-based, year-long postdoc program that funds its fellows for a-day-a-week, providing them the opportunity to pursue commercialization of a technology that originated in MIT research. The program provides mentoring resources, integrated conflict-of-interest (COI) management and other support to help contain risk and maximize the opportunity to create a new venture.

HACKATHONS

Energy Hack

For students, the MIT Energy Hackathon is a helpful platform to learn real-world challenges, generate ideas, find startup partners, and win cash awards. For companies, it acts as a powerful crowdsourcing platform that generates a breadth of potential solutions for their challenge.

HackMIT

HackMIT is MIT’s largest hackathon. Over a 24-hour period in early fall, 1,000 hackers from around the world gather on MIT’s campus to experiment and innovate on software and hardware projects. This is a weekend to dust off old ideas or try something completely new. Imagine the craziest projects possible, and work on the hack of your dreams!

Hacking Arts

Hacking Arts ignites entrepreneurship and innovation within the creative arts, bringing creative technologists, artists, innovators and hackers together at MIT to explore the future of the arts at thus annual conference, tech expo, and hackathon.

Hacking Medicine

MIT Hacking Medicine is one of the largest health hackathons in the world, a weekend to brainstorm and build innovative solutions with hundreds of like-minded engineers, clinicians, designers, developers, and business people. With three hackathon tracks, there is sure to be a healthcare challenge for everyone!

MakeMIT

MakeMIT promotes innovation that is geared towards those who are excited and passionate about designing and building. Over 250 students will participate in a 15+ hour hardware hackathon (the most recent was held on February 13, 2016). The top ten teams will be invited to come back for a second weekend in order to refine their design.

VR/AR Hackathon

Called Reality, Virtually, this hackathon will promote new applications built for vertical market segments. The competition will stretch the amazing advancements and expertise in VR and AR gaming and entertainment during the past couple of years, into new and lesser-cultivated fields.