We grew slowly at first but enough for then MIT President Charles Vest to say in 1996, "We must not only be the best. We must also serve as a model for others and ensure that, together, we all make a significant global impact in this vital field." To achieve these objectives the E-Center established key initial goals of recruiting a critical mass of leading professors and practitioners to build our educational program, and raising major endowment funds to support the teaching, research and vital student activities.

As described in greater depth in the History and Development of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center we have been able over the years to make significant progress toward these goals. The funding has facilitated the recruiting of world-class educators, and the classes and clubs in particular have helped attract a continuously increasing number of top-notch students from across all of MIT. Our tenured and tenure-track faculty are complemented by a large number of Senior Lecturers, who are proven entrepreneurs and/or venture capitalists in their own right. These practitioners return to the classroom to give back to the very system that helped them to succeed.

Since its inception nearly twenty years ago the MIT E-Center has been on a growth trajectory, increasing enrollment in entrepreneurship courses while launching new academic initiatives such as our MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship & Innovation MBA Track, new student activities, and new faculty research directions. These growth areas have included global expansion of our programs, such as our new efforts in Portugal and with Tsinghua University in China and Kyushu University in Japan, as well as our cross-campus outreach, such as the recent set of initiatives in energy entrepreneurship.

We continue to define new challenges and we seek your participation in meeting them.