Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship

The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT is a global learning platform for innovation-driven entrepreneurs building a better world. Founded on the belief that entrepreneurs and their market-driven solutions are critical to advancing economic and social progress globally, the center drives prosperity by building pathways for principled entrepreneurial leaders to transform systems and improve lives.

The Legatum Fellowship is a competitive program designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs gain a world-class education at MIT to maximize their likelihood of success as principled, impactful leaders in emerging markets. Each year, we build a cohort of 20–25 students from across MIT who are dedicated to building and scaling ventures in the developing world. We provide them with tuition, travel, and prototyping support, as well as access to mentors, special seminars, and other cross-campus resources.

The Foundry Fellowship is a fellowship for Africa-based founders who have scaled innovation-driven companies and find themselves at an inflection point in their entrepreneurial journey. The fellowship brings fellows together to consider their present and future leadership roles as entrepreneurs, investors, policy influencers, and thought leaders building entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems.

Leveraging the valuable knowledge of our our students, alumni, and the global entrepreneurship community allows us to advance research and thought leadership that can influence entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Our research agenda has three elements: case studies highlighting the experiences of our alumni; support for and coalescence of existing MIT research efforts to understand the impact of innovation and entrepreneurship in the developing world; and financial resources to translate evidence-based insights into actionable recommendations. The research assistantship program also supports students and faculty who want to develop, share, and implement business and policy tools