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Celebrating Community & Collaboration: MIT Students Explore Climate Policy at the Queensland University of Technology

Emma Kantola

Nov 8, 2024

We are halfway through the Fall 2024 semester, and for our first-year MBAs that means participating in LEAD week: a three-day program where students take a break from their regular coursework to take workshops that cover the complexities of diversity, equity, inclusion, leadership, and ethics. For our second-year MBAs, this week-long break creates an opportunity to explore a variety of student leadership experiences. One group of students spent the week at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) International Collaboration Sprint.

We asked these students to reflect on how their sustainability coursework influenced their experience at QUT. They explored themes of community, innovation, collaboration, and policy, and how each are integral in creating climate solutions. We hope you enjoy hearing their stories and learning more about this unique international program organized by the Martin Trust Center and QUT Entrepreneurship!

But first, we connected with Ben Soltoff, Ecosystem-Builder & Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at the Martin Trust Center to learn more about how this program came to be. Learn more below!

MIT Program Participants — Program Participants From Left to Right: Lizzy Salata, Ben Soltoff, Rory Burke, Jonny Yau, and Bria Hardin-Boyer

Ben Soltoff, Ecosystem-Builder & Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR), Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

Many great innovations start with the question “What if?”

A few years ago, Glen Murphy, director of entrepreneurship at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), asked me, “What if you brought a bunch of MIT MBAs over here to Brisbane to put their heads together with our QUT MBAs?” That was the genesis of the QUT International Collaboration Sprint, which just wrapped up its third cohort, bringing together 22 MBA students from four universities across three continents, including QUT, MIT, the University of Auckland, and the National University of Singapore.

Each year, the students work together in international, cross-discipline, multi-university teams to address a pressing challenge, with a focus on entrepreneurship. This year, our theme centered on climate policy. The students gathered just two weeks before an election in the US that will be hugely consequential for climate policy, and Queensland was counting down to state elections on the last day of the program, both of which ended up bringing about a change in government. The students came from countries that each have a distinct approach to addressing climate change, ranging from the tax incentives and economic growth priorities in the US Inflation Reduction Act and Australia’s Future Made in Australia act to the broader but less specific strategies of Singapore’s 2030 Green Plan or New Zealand’s Climate Change Response Amendment Act.

The goal of this year’s sprint was to look at a particular area of climate technology and assess the pros and cons of various regions for commercializing and scaling that technology, with an emphasis on the policy regime. What if we pushed for space-based solar panels in Australia? Or hydrogen power generation in New Zealand? Or new battery advancements in Singapore? What would that look like? What would be the advantages and disadvantages? Those were the questions that the students sought to answer collaboratively with their teams. In the process, they not only learned about climate, policy, and entrepreneurship but also learned about the cultures and personalities of the other participants. Plus, they had a bit of genuine Aussie fun, like feeding kangaroos and petting koalas.