Sloan Innovation Period
Personalized Skill Building
The Sloan Innovation Period (SIP) replaces the traditional 13-week semester with a more effective rhythm, allowing students to engage in intellectual exploration outside the classroom. SIP, which takes place at the midpoint of each semester, offers the opportunity to participate in a variety of leadership and research seminars and activities, all centered on the theme of innovation. SIP provides our students and faculty with a flexible, open-format time period to jointly explore the terrain that makes MIT Sloan truly unique: the combination of our research expertise, our leadership acumen, and the hands-on applicability of this knowledge.
A One-Week Learning Opportunity
SIP occurs at the midpoint of each semester and provides students with an intensive week of experiential leadership learning, as well as exposure to groundbreaking faculty research.
Flexibility in Focus
The flexibility of SIP course selection permits students to focus on a particular area of interest, further customizing the experience.
"The classroom itself is filled with so much collective brain power . . . it's obvious that I'm caught up in a room full of 124 of the brightest, most curious people from around the world."
“I love being in a place that is such a nexus of people and ideas — people coming to learn something new and to define themselves. Being a part of that process is a real honor and a real gift.”
“I can honestly say that when I was planning on coming to business school I never thought that witnessing the birth of a child would be included in the education. It was definitely an experience.”
“At MIT Sloan you have a lot of opportunities to explore entrepreneurship. Especially in a place like Kampala where you have a lot of development, entrepreneurship can be very exciting.”
“The concept behind enterprise architecture is that you have all these machines, you have all these business processes, you have all these people doing things, how do you make sure they all come together and achieve business objectives that make you more competitive.”
“Our mission, along with the mission of MIT Sloan, is to both develop leaders who make a difference in the world, and also to make a contribution to thinking about the topic of leadership.”
“[The India Lab] program is one of the reasons I came to Sloan. ... The hands-on learning that MIT offers was a huge differentiator.”
“The conditions in the neighborhoods we were visiting were different than what we realized before getting there. Beyond that, what was surprising was that there weren’t surprises!”
“I knew about American business, but not enough about what’s really become a global economy. … You can read about it all you want, but there’s no substitute for being there and seeing the context and seeing how completely different these [other countries] are.”
“I came to Sloan because of its high rankings within the sustainability community, specifically the professors. The S-Lab class itself is part of what drew me to Sloan. And the reason I came to business school was to learn the business speak that really is what connects with people."
"The relationships that we forged helped us to turn out a better project. We were able to test our hypotheses with the people that we spoke with every single day. And really, I think the friendships that you develop really propel the work that you’re doing."
“It was really rewarding that they wanted to know what we thought. We left there being fairly certain that they will do some of the things that we suggested.”
“Because of the diversity of our backgrounds, when we hit the ground in Tanzania it almost was a natural play where different people assume different roles.”
“One of the reasons I came to Sloan was because I wanted to be at a top MBA institution worldwide. But I also wanted access to working with the latest innovations and the highest technology that was coming out of the MIT labs.”
“We’re very interdisciplinary. Among the faculty in the group are an economist, a political scientist, a sociologist, and an industrial relations specialist. We’ve always made a big effort to be open to a variety of perspectives, but also to go beyond being open to them, to want to bring them in, because it makes for a richer environment.”
"We have the next generation of financial wizards. Our hope is that students will be able to get access to new types of knowledge well before those research ideas are widely used. Get in on the ground floor. We have star professors — you’re learning from the masters: Stewart Myers, Stephen Ross, and Paul Samuelson."
