Innovation is the core of MIT's self-image. No matter what problem the world might throw at us, we treat it as a design challenge waiting for a creative mind to solve it. We can hack our way around anything.

"Be careful about that word innovation," said Greg Jones in his talk this afternoon. Jones directs leadership education at Duke University's Divinity School. He pointed out that when we seek innovation and disruption over all other ends, we will create chaos. Everyone talks about disruption as an ideal, but people can't live in disruption; we need patterns and purpose. The first thing crisis counselors tell people whose lives have been truly disrupted is to find a routine.

True creativity emerges when we have done our homework: we know why we want to build something new, and we know the discipline well enough to build on structures that work. A new design builds on an older one. A scientific finding is grounded in the proven methods and reliable data that came before. 

We want to build a scientific community to serve the needs of the future. But we can't create it out of nothing. We start where we are now, in an Institute with its own history. If we never look at its patterns, we will follow them unconsciously, and we will have no hope of creating positive change. We have to know our history, the good and the bad, so we can decide what to carry into the future.

We are proud to co-sponsor a talk tomorrow night on the history of funding for science at MIT by Noam Chomsky and Subrata Ghoshroy with the organization Science For the People. They are reviving a great history of asking questions: Who is this science for? Who pays for it? Who gains from it? The event will illuminate some of the obstacles that still stand in our way when we try to direct the Institute's energy towards solving the problems of our own time. When we know where we've come from, then we can see where we are going.