MIT students, alumni, faculty and staff have founded tens of thousands of new companies. In a comprehensive study recently published, Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT, we estimate that 33,600 companies had been founded by alumni who were still living in 2006, of which 25,800 companies were still in business at that time. This does not include the many companies founded by non-alumni MIT staff and faculty members. Nor does it count the many emerging companies that have been established by others based upon technologies licensed from the MIT Technology Licensing Office.

MIT students and alums start between 250 and 300 new firms each year. The entrepreneurial spirit is surely contagious at MIT. Over half of all MIT-alumni companies are founded within 10 years of the time the founder graduates from MIT; one-quarter of the companies are founded within six years of graduation.

Even at the outset of the 20th century, MIT alumni were founding what became impressive long-surviving firms: Campbell Soup in 1900 and Gillette in 1901. AMP, Analog Devices, Bose, DEC, Genentech, HP, Intel, McDonnell Douglas, TI are among the "corporate household names" of new enterprises started by MIT graduates. See our table, Examples of Important MIT Alumni-Founded Companies, for many more examples and more details on some MIT spinoffs.