Happy Birthday, Joseph Wharton! 🎉 This Tuesday, March 3, marks the 200th birthday of the industrialist and philanthropist who gave his name to this institution. In honor of our namesake hitting his bicentennial year, we’re sharing four lessons that innovators can learn from Joseph Wharton’s story. 1) Bet early on…Read More
On February 18, the Mack Institute partnered with the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Commerce to host the latest installment of Tech Talks, a series designed to convene the region’s founder community around topics in innovation. Held on Wharton’s campus, From Promise to Pilot: How Pilots Can Drive Business…Read More
Photo by Lamont Abrams for Penn Engineering Congratulations to this year’s Y-Prize winners, CarboWells! The team proposed a 3D-printed concrete well plug that captures carbon and is designed to reduce failure rates in abandoned oil and gas wells. There are an estimated 2 million abandoned wells across the United States,…Read More 
Artificial intelligence has already proven it can perform specific medical tasks, such as interpreting X-rays or flagging risks in patient data. But caring for patients is not a series of isolated decisions. It is a dynamic process that unfolds over time, requiring clinicians to interpret signals from multiple sources and…Read More
Digital Twins 2.0: Making the Invisible Visible Fall 2025 Conference Report Digital twins are moving rapidly from niche technology to a central tool for business innovation. From factory floors and operating rooms to autonomous vehicles and global enterprises, the technology is shifting from experimental pilots to scalable, revenue-generating systems. The…Read More 
Congratulations to the four student teams chosen as finalists for this year’s Y-Prize competition: Aeronyx, Carbo Wells, Haven and Lattica! The Y-Prize competition challenges students to build their entrepreneurial skills by creating business plans for technologies invented at Penn Engineering. The team with the best commercial application wins $15,000 to help…Read More
On Tuesday, November 19, the Mack Institute co-hosted, along with Pennovation Works and the Penn Center for Innovation, the semester’s first installment of the Entrepreneurship Speaker Series featuring Wharton Professor Tyler Wry. His presentation, “Brace for Impact: Value Creation Beyond the Bottom Line,” explored how businesses can pursue a “hybrid…Read More
Many of today’s most transformative technologies have their origins in university research, from life-saving drugs and medical devices to advanced building materials. When these discoveries succeed in the marketplace, they not only improve lives but also become an important source of revenue for universities. But the path from lab to…Read More
On Friday, September 26, the Mack Institute, in partnership with EVERSANA, AWS and Modus Create, hosted Disrupting the Life Sciences Commercial Model: Exploring the Future Impact of AI and Patient-Centric Healthcare. This intimate event brought together senior executives from pharma and medtech with Wharton and Penn faculty to explore how AI,…Read More
The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the most complex organizations in the world — so how is it approaching generative AI? A new report from Wharton’s Prof. Serguei Netessine and WG’25 Andrew Stiles examines the DoD’s early steps toward integrating GenAI and highlights lessons that industry leaders can…Read More 
The Mack Institute is pleased to announce a new course for MBA students, Commercialization of Academic Science, piloting in Fall 2025. This hands-on course pairs student teams with Penn researchers who are developing cutting-edge technologies across healthcare, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. Students will be tasked with conducting customer discovery,…Read More
Startup acquisitions by established firms are becoming more common, especially in fast-moving industries like tech and healthcare. But integrating a newly-acquired startup presents challenges, and can end up quashing creativity and worsening innovation outcomes. A new study, funded in part by the Mack Institute and conducted by Mack Core Team…Read More 
The Mack Institute is proud to release our newest work of original research, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups are Redefining Corporate Venturing. Based on a systematic review of the world’s 500 largest companies, it presents a data-driven analysis of how corporations are partnering with startups to fuel…Read More 
Corporate Venturing 2025: A New Model of Corporate-Startup Interaction Tuesday, June 24 | 2:00 p.m. | via Zoom Join us for a webinar marking the release of our new report, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups Are Redefining Corporate Venturing. The report explores how established companies are increasingly…Read More 
Penn Hyperloop, a student team sponsored in part by the Mack Institute, made an impressive showing at The Boring Company’s “Not-a-Boring” Competition, a global contest that challenges university teams to design and build advanced tunnel boring machines. Competing against top engineering programs from around the world, Penn Hyperloop earned third…Read More
Mack Institute predoctoral fellow Lennart Meincke, Wharton Professor Gideon Nave, and Mack Institute Co-Director Christian Terwiesch have published a new paper on AI and creativity in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour. Building on growing research into how artificial intelligence can support idea generation, their study reveals a crucial tradeoff:…Read More
This spring, a student team from the Mack Institute for Innovation Management collaborated with Penn’s Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab to explore how to bring the lab’s latest innovation, an AI-powered media bias detection tool, to market. The student team is Jieru Shi​ (WG'25), Keshav Ramesh​ (W'25) and Caleb Yam…Read More 
Algorithms shape countless decisions in our digital lives, powering everything from personalized ads to loan approvals. Many of the most powerful algorithms are so-called “black box” algorithms, meaning that no one, not even the developers building them or the businesses deploying them, fully understands how they work. While these hyper-complex…Read More
Friday, March 21, 2025 The Wharton School, Philadelphia The Mack Institute is pleased to announce our Spring 2025 conference, Productivity in the Age of Intelligent Automation. This one-day event will bring together leading Wharton researchers and expert business practitioners to examine the uncertain question of how artificial intelligence will impact…Read More 
Congratulations to this year’s Y-Prize winners, Stentix! The team proposed a bile duct stent that can be adjusted noninvasively, helping to maintain bile flow without additional surgeries. A biliary stent is a small, tube-like device inserted into the bile ducts to keep them open and allow bile to flow from…Read More
