Social Innovation Exploration (SIE)

The PKG Center for Public Service knows every MIT student is an innovator —even if that title is intimidating. SIE is a 5-day social impact hackathon. Get a warm introduction to MIT’s unique hacker culture, teaching you how to tangibly address challenges facing MIT’s student community at a systems level.

In teams, you will design interventions that address a pressing social issue facing MIT’s campus, such as food insecurity and sustainability, after 5 days of:

LEARNING about social change, innovation, entrepreneurship, and systemic issues that affect MIT students

RESEARCHING who is most impacted and the underlying mental models and values systems that make it difficult to address these challenges long-term

EXPLORING the social innovation and entrepreneurship resources and unique hacker culture on campus

DESIGNING interventions by learning how to build rapid prototypes, quick experimentation, iterative problem solving, and other frameworks of hacker culture and social innovation.

Dates: Tuesday, August 19 – Saturday, August 23, 2025
Number of participants: 15
Cost: $0