A few years ago, a young engineer named Yen Pei Tay enrolled in MIT’s Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. He had taken the Entrepreneurship 101 and 102 massive open online courses (MOOCs) through MITx and was ready to test an idea for a new digital platform.

He had already created a technology that would enable individual mobile users to sell their unused data directly to other users, but was struggling to bring his platform to market.

“I came to MIT to validate the concept of Wi-Fi sharing, leveraging the same technology that we had built,” Tay says. “At the bootcamp, with feedback from mentors and investors, we got a real reboot.”

That reboot, which involved a shift away from business users and toward individual consumers, resulted in an app called Simplify, which was first introduced on the Google Play store last August.

Exceeding all expectations, Simplify has just been named by Fast Company magazine as one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2017.

Fast Company creates this list by surveying thousands of enterprises across the globe. It identifies the most notable innovations and traces their impact on business, industry, and the larger culture. In this year’s rankings, Tay’s small startup was listed alongside global tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Netflix.

Read the complete article at MIT News