Luis Perez-Breva, PhD is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator and the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto (The MIT Press, 2017). He is an MIT expert in technology innovation, combinatorial innovation, innovation factories, venture labs, venture building, taking deep tech to impact, and applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems.
He has enjoyed success with inventions and new companies in security, telecom, fintech, and genetics to name some. Chiefly among them is the AI-based system to locate 911 calls in case of emergency deployed worldwide. His work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC, Wharton Business Radio, Entrepreneur, Zdnet, Quartz, Epsilon Theory and several other national and international media.
Currently, Luis is the Faculty Director of Innovation Teams, MIT’s flagship joint enterprise between MIT Engineering and MIT Sloan to put the Institute’s deep tech advances to work to solve real-world problems. Since 2007, through iTeams, he has helped over 200 MIT technologies find a path to impact leading to the formation of some 40 new, enduring deep tech companies across all industries from mining to telecommunications. During the COVID pandemic, educational innovations pioneered from iTeams were recognized as key contributions to reinventing education.
Luis has worked with venture capital and numerous corporations and adapted his work to develop innovation factories, and eliminate innovation waste. Currently, Luis is developing a technology repurposing fund to rescue, recycle, and, in essence, turn around technologies analogous to how private equity seeks to turn around companies. In 2022, Luis received an Extraordinary Leaders Transforming an Industry award from Unorthodox Philanthropy to launch S1 Industries PBC as a new way to deploy and share the benefits from innovation for impact. S1 Industries PBC brings together Luis’ AI expertise and his combinatorial innovation methods to repurpose technology and move it to impact.
Dr. Perez-Breva holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT and degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and business from leading universities in Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the United States (MIT). In 2011, the Spanish government recognized his career achievements by awarding him the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain. In 2020 Luis became an American citizen. In 2021 Luis was awarded with the Rafael del Pino Foundation Chair.