Lemelson-MIT Program

The Lemelson-MIT Program. This program promotes and celebrates the work of individual inventors through annual awards and competitions. Each year, it awards the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the $100,000 Award for Sustainability, and the $30,000 Student Prize. In 2007, the program introduced two additional $30,000 student prizes to be awarded at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It also sponsors InvenTeams, which provide direct support to high school teams of young inventors. Through its outreach activities, the Lemelson-MIT Program provides MIT faculty and students with opportunities to work on inventions for the developing world. The program publishes handbooks that guide inventors in the development and marketing of their work.

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). The NCIIA, one of the first programs initiated by Jerome Lemelson, fosters invention and entrepreneurship in higher education to catalyze innovative, commercially viable businesses. Over 200 universities and colleges are members of the NCIIA. Students at these schools can apply for grants to form multi-disciplinary "E-Teams" ("E" for "excellence" and "entrepreneurship"), that develop product ideas, build prototypes and research marketing strategies. The program also provides faculty with grants to develop new ways to teach invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. An example of an E-Team is “GROW,” a hybrid solar/wind energy-producing device that resembles vines of ivy; their innovation was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition. Another example is Keen Mobility, which grew out of an E-Team project that developed a new type of crutch that utilizes different types of shock absorbers to reduce long term muscular-skeletal injuries in the disabled. Over 81 businesses have been launched as a result of students taking inventions that they developed with NCIIA grants to commercialization.