Imagine you’re a student who needs to make the most of your academic experience. Luckily, there’s a customizable digital infrastructure that acts like a personal guide, giving you different learning pathways to pursue. You get specific and individualized academic guidance to improve your outcomes, tools to help you understand your options, and names of people in the school’s ecosystem that could offer community and give advice. The infrastructure updates in real time, so the information doesn’t become outdated or irrelevant.
At MIT, this tool exists. It’s called Orbit, and it was developed by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship in 2019. This “one-stop shop for entrepreneurs” is now open to other participants across the Institute’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s designed to help with coursework, business information and tools, jobs and internships, peer learning and mentorship, available events on and off campus, and more.
The Orbit site came from the Trust Center’s need for a more dynamic interface, beyond a relatively static website. “We weren’t following our own protocols of entrepreneurship,” explains Bill Aulet, SF ’94 (Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship). “You meet the students where they are, and more and more of them were on their phones.”
The Trust Center leadership hypothesized that a dynamic app would be the best place to make resources and tools available. The more a student uses the app, the more Orbit personalizes recommendations. Resources include more than 5,000 searchable articles, a chatbot that’s customized for entrepreneurship information, and a “MyJourney” advisor tool that helps students understand their recommended academic pathways.
According to Aulet, Orbit has been rolled out to over 25 percent of the MIT student body thus far. Aulet and his team have been able to track and analyze users’ activity, which helps them understand what offerings are missing. They noticed students were interested in a tool that would quickly develop and analyze ideas. This led to a months-long project for leadership to develop, as Aulet puts it, “an MVP of an AI assistant.”
While I said this AI is ‘automating’ the entrepreneurship process, really it’s simplifying the time spent on R&D so that the magic of entrepreneurial leadership—courage, bias-for-action, intuitive decision-making, and making smart, well-placed bets—becomes even more critical as differentiators in the innovation process.
The result is the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack (MIT Eship JetPack), a generative AI tool trained on the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework—founded by Aulet—that is housed within Orbit. If you input a business concept, “it’s like having five or 10 or 12 MIT undergraduates who instantaneously run out and do all the research you want based on the question you asked, and then they bring back the answer,” Aulet says.
MIT Eship JetPack has also been made available to a select number of non-MIT students in a private beta. (For those interested in testing the tool, there is a waitlist that prospective users can join.) The results on the initial beta were, Aulet says, “breathtakingly positive,” and he adds that “it is an assistant that compresses the time to investigate an idea by what I would estimate as 80 percent.”
Shari Van Cleave, EMBA ’15, founder of The Retreat, did a demo of the program in August 2024. Based on a single idea, MIT Eship JetPack fleshes out the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework by identifying beachhead markets and competition; finding demographic size; providing ranges of profitability, time frames, and momentum opportunities; showing potential business models and estimating resources required; and even giving a “grade” on the idea based on its feasibility and potential challenges. It’s easy to modify the idea and immediately rerun the model to compare results.
Instantly, an entrepreneur can learn whether an idea is practical and worthwhile. “While I said this AI is ‘automating’ the entrepreneurship process, really it’s simplifying the time spent on R&D so that the magic of entrepreneurial leadership—courage, bias-for-action, intuitive decision-making, and making smart, well-placed bets—becomes even more critical as differentiators in the innovation process,” says Van Cleave.
As students continue to use this and the other powerful Orbit tools at their fingertips, they’re also helping the Trust Center by giving feedback and data. This longitudinal view of popular programs and courses, as well as what pathways and resources students are using, will in turn help improve the Trust Center.
In essence, students will have essential resources at their disposal, and the Institute will more fully understand what the students are using—learning, as the center notes, “which programs are popular, which are not, which are effective, and which are less so, ultimately leading to an evidence-based way to make investment decisions that improve learning outcomes.”
