Luis Perez-Breva

Luis Perez-Breva, PhD, is an expert in the process of technology innovation, an entrepreneur, and the the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong. (MIT Press 2017).

Currently Perez-Breva directs the MIT Innovation Teams Program, MIT’s flagship hands-on innovation program jointly operated between the Schools of Engineering and Management. During his tenure, i-Teams has shepherded over 170 MIT technologies to discover a path to impact. He co-led the Innovation Pillar of the MIT Skoltech Initiative, and collaborates with MIT’s innovation initiatives in Portugal, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. He has taught innovating as a skill worldwide to professionals and students from all disciplines; and gotten them started innovating from pretty much anything: hunches, real-world problems, engineering problem sets, and research breakthroughs.

He is a serial innovator with successes in emergency cell phone location technologies currently deployed worldwide, and a fully automated portfolio allocation and trading system; and numerous other stories to share from his trial and error adventures to conceive artificial intelligence technologies that tackle real-world problems and drive them to market.

Dr. Perez-Breva holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Physics, Business, and Artificial Intelligence from Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the US (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). As an innovator and entrepreneur he has worked on cell phone location for emergency response and national security, genetics, healthcare intelligence, automated portfolio allocation, and developed several non-profit organizations, including building a new university centered around innovation. In 2011, the government of Spain recognized his career achievements with the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain.