Innovation expert Elliott Masie explains the aim of his MASIE Center think tank: to investigate the connections between technology, innovation, and learning. A major component of this is an understanding of the changing relationship between ideas and the marketplace.

Elliot Masie: Innovation happens and it happens now in ways that are almost instant in the marketplace. So somebody comes up with a wonderful idea that we could do, a 3D printer. In the old days it might have been 12 years before we could see it but about nine months later for $1200 you can buy one. Or a drone. Now not a missile firing drone but a drone with a high pro now 4K camera that you can fly above your house or above a crowd and get a video. Or even increasingly wearables and the like. What we do at the MASIE Center is we take an innovation that’s cool, cool, cool and ask an interesting very important question beyond being cool can it do anything. Specifically can it help an individual or a corporation with learning. And so drones. They’re kind of fun to fly. I have three of them but if you worked at an insurance company and there was a fire imagine the ability to literally hours after the fire is under control to fly above not only for you the insurance company doing an audit but think about the peace of mind for the owner of that house. So we’re always involved kind of like the MIT media lab for learning to look at the connection between technology and innovation and learning.

Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton