These new MIT Sloan courses track emerging technologies and business trends

The MIT Sloan School of Management has added 13 new courses to this year’s curriculum. 

Among them is a new MIT Sloan certificate program, CATAPULT. Developed by Andrew Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT Sloan, the four-course program is designed to help PhD students in science and engineering at MIT translate their research into practice in deep-tech fields such as biomedicine, nuclear energy, climate sciences, quantum computing, and space exploration. 

Read on for descriptions on all the new MIT Sloan courses — and reflections on why the subjects they focus on matter to business leaders.

AI Builder Space Proseminar

In this hands-on course, led by MIT Sloan principal lecturer Rachel Peters Card and assistant professor Austin van Loon, MBA students will build practical artificial intelligence fluency and a portfolio of real work relevant to today’s job market. 

Using frontier AI tools such as Claude Code and Vercel, students will focus on understanding the AI landscape, building individual and team projects, and collaborating through check-ins, paired interviews, and share-outs over three-week-long sprints. 

“Our students come to Sloan with varying levels of AI fluency. However, every student walks in with expertise from somewhere — a previous career, a personal passion area, a lived experience — and that context is a superpower when applied to AI,” Card said. “We’re striving to teach students to be empowered, adaptable builders in a landscape that’s moving faster than any curriculum can keep up with.” 

AI Strategy, Governance, and Ethics

AI is rapidly reshaping competitive strategy and corporate governance, with profound implications for enterprise risk and the ethical responsibilities of business professionals. Jeffrey Saviano, a senior lecturer with three decades of experience at EY, teaches this course around his Boundaries of Tolerance framework, an integrated approach to leading AI adoption responsibly and strategically in complex organizations. 

Students will learn how strategic AI choices create downstream risk and ethical consequences, how governance structures shape escalation and accountability, and why leaders must define ethical boundaries in advance rather than under crisis conditions. 

The course culminates with each student drafting a personal Boundaries of Tolerance charter, linking their personal values to professional leadership responsibilities.

AI-Augmented Work

AI may appear to be a looming threat to human workers, but leaders have options — including taking a worker-centered approach to AI system design. 

In this new course, assistant professor Zana Buçinca teaches practical skills for prototyping and innovating AI solutions that complement and extend rather than replace human capabilities. Lessons will draw on theories of work, research on human-AI interaction, and industry cases and provide frameworks for analyzing how AI system design and implementation shape human judgment, creativity, skill development, and collective intelligence. 

“The prevailing vision for AI has been to automate human intelligence and, with it, human work,” Buçinca said. “This course equips leaders with the intellectual and practical tools to challenge that vision and create alternative AI solutions that augment their workforce’s judgment and skills — and create more value for the organization as a result.”

Defense and Dual-Use Ventures

The “defense, security, and resilience” sector is a growing part of the global economy as governments seek market-based ways to secure their nations and build their economies. But companies that sell into both commercial and DSR markets face the unique challenge of building products for customers with different procurement rules, funding sources, and regulatory environments.

In this course, professor of entrepreneurship Fiona Murray, principal lecturer Gene Keselman, and senior lecturer Phil Budden will cover how the DSR ecosystem actually works, from procurement to capital; the strategic decisions a dual-use venture has to make; and the international context, including export controls and foreign capital.

“Defense, security and resilience are central to how countries protect themselves, respond to crises, and, now more than ever, build their economies,” Keselman said. “A company grown with consideration for both markets pulls government and the industrial base closer together, which is the goal for most nations.”

Economics of Ideas and Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is increasingly understood as a process of forming beliefs about the value of specific opportunities, learning and experimenting to validate those beliefs (or not), and then acting on that information through innovation and commercialization.  

In this new doctoral course, professor Scott Stern will examine how economists and other social scientists can rigorously study that process and its consequences. Topics include why individuals pursue particular opportunities, how entrepreneurs learn and experiment under uncertainty, and how beliefs and experiences shape strategic choices and competitive interaction. Students will then examine broader questions about creative destruction, economic growth, and social progress.

“Over the past decade, research on entrepreneurship has become much more rigorous, with new theory, richer data, field experiments, and increasingly credible quantitative evidence,” Stern said. “We wanted to give MIT doctoral students a way to engage seriously with that emerging body of research.”

Understanding and Solving Complex Business Problems

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Family Offices: Purpose, Design, Functions, and Ecosystem

Family offices represent one of the most significant, least understood, and fastest-evolving institutional structures in global private capital. Collectively, they manage a significant portion — more than $5.5 trillion worth — of the assets of ultra-high-net-worth family enterprises. 

In this course, John Davis, a senior lecturer in family enterprise, and lecturer Thierry Vanparys frame the family office not as a technical financial vehicle but as a purpose-driven, adaptive organization with a financial component embedded within a broader family enterprise. 

Students will apply a unifying analytical framework — purpose → capital → governance → organization → ecosystem — to develop a systemic understanding of family offices, their functions, and how they relate to the broader family enterprise, the wealth management and services ecosystem, and the broader economy.

Leading Agentic AI Transformation in Organizations

Organizations have successfully experimented with generative AI, developing and disseminating solutions that help employees draft content, summarize information, and generate code. Now, many firms are finding that the practices that enabled them to move generative AI from experimentation to scale are insufficient for developing and scaling agentic AI systems that can plan, make decisions, use tools, and execute multistep autonomous workflows.

In this course, professor of management and innovation Kate Kellogg will highlight what it’s really like to develop and implement agentic AI workflows inside an organization, across five phases: 1. Architecting for agentic AI. 2. Co-creating agentic workflows. 3. Deploying agentic systems. 4. Monitoring agentic systems. 5. Scaling agentic AI. 

Students will discuss cases and listen to fireside chats with leaders from a range of organizations, learning where leaders have been surprised and what they are doing to move forward.

New Manufacturing

For some of the most innovative products and companies representing the frontier of science and engineering, manufacturing is a key challenge to continued innovation — as well as an enabler of growth and improvement. Ben Armstrong, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center, has organized this course around five core areas of the manufacturing economy and our everyday lives: transportation, energy, buildings, food and medicine, and defense.  

The course will examine how manufacturing is organized in each domain, as well as the economic, social, and technical structure that has led to this arrangement.

“There is a growing recognition in the United States that innovation and economic security rely on manufacturing,” Armstrong said. “Preparing future business leaders to understand how factories work — and what can help them grow and evolve — will be key to revitalizing the manufacturing economy.”

Strategic Communication for Finance Professionals

Christopher Cullen and Melissa Webster, both senior lecturers in managerial communication at MIT Sloan, designed this course to help students develop and polish the range of communication skills they need to be successful in the field of finance. 

Transactions, Strategic Dealmaking, and the Law

Business leaders encounter a variety of common but complex deals — venture capital and private equity financing, M&As, restructurings and bankruptcy, public offerings, hostile transactions, cross-border deals, and transactions amid a crisis among them. 

In this course, Heather Stone, counsel at Troutman Pepper Locke, offers students insights into those and other transactions, with an emphasis on how business leaders make decisions under pressure. Students will evaluate real-world transactions, board-level dilemmas, term sheets and deal documents, legal compliance, and negotiation scenarios and failures. 

“Great business leaders don’t need to be lawyers, but they do need to understand how law, economics, strategy, and human behavior interact when the stakes are high,” Stone said. “Understanding how deals are structured — and where they succeed, fail, or create unintended consequences — makes leaders better decision makers, negotiators, and stewards of their organizations.”

Introducing CATAPULT

In addition to helping MIT STEM students translate research to practice, the courses in MIT Sloan’s new Certificate in Advancing Translation and Promoting University Led Technologies also explore potential career paths in academia and in government or philanthropic organizations.

A hub-and-spokes approach

The core class covers the human side of innovation — leadership, negotiation, resilience, and decision-making under uncertainty — and the ability to communicate complex ideas to diverse stakeholders, navigate collaborations and conflicts of interest, manage intellectual property in academic settings, and work effectively across interdisciplinary teams. 

The second half divides the class into field-specific spokes. The first two offered this fall are biotechnology (led by Lo) and advanced energy technologies (led by senior lecturer John Parsons). The biotech spoke introduces students to the full lifecycle of translating scientific research into impact across the life sciences, including therapeutics, devices, and diagnostics. The advanced energy tech spoke draws on examples from fusion, advanced fission, and adjacent technologies, and explores how complex energy systems are designed, built, and deployed. 

CATAPULT Clinic

In this course, co-led by Lo and The Engine CEO Emily Knight, students will gain practical experience in live startup settings, with support from industry mentors and the instructors. Pairs of students will be assigned to startups currently being incubated at The Engine, MIT’s accelerator for tough technology, and present the problems those companies are facing during weekly class sessions.

The clinic aims to help students diagnose an early-stage technology company; distinguish technical bottlenecks from commercial, regulatory, financial, and organizational ones; frame decisions under uncertainty for those who must act on them; present a live, unresolved problem clearly and concisely to experienced practitioners and absorb critiques; and assess whether a startup is an environment in which they want to build a career. 

LEARN FROM THE MIT EXPERTS

Here is a selection of MIT Sloan executive education courses taught by faculty members mentioned above:

Accelerating Innovation Through Ecosystems Sprint

Artificial Intelligence for Financial Services: Tools, Opportunities, and Challenges

Future Family Enterprise: Sustaining Multigenerational Success

Geopolitics for Executives: From Global Risk to Strategic Advantage

Innovation in the Age of AI