Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

About the Goal

The United Nations aims to build resilient infrastructure and promote inclusive, sustainable industrialization by 2030.

Northwestern is engaged in a broad range of research projects and other initiatives aimed at realizing this goal, including efforts to facilitate collaborations across engineering, biological and environmental systems, human-centered design, data science, industrial organization, and national security fields to promote industrial innovation. Other examples include initiatives focused on areas such as market organization, internet policy, entrepreneurship, and transportation policy and management.

Northwestern Experts and Initiatives

The Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO)

The Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO) supports innovation and entrepreneurship at Northwestern and helps move Northwestern technologies to the marketplace.  Its mission is to integrate the educational and research mission with the University’s social contract to contribute to economic growth and move research innovations to the market, and to support an entrepreneurial culture by encouraging relevant initiatives across the university. INVO partners with faculty and students across the Chicago and Evanston campuses, as well as our partners at Lurie Children’s Hospital, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and the AbilityLab, to create startups and partnerships with corporations. By fostering innovation and commercialization, INVO strives to improve quality of life and fuel economic growth

Benjamin F. Jones

Ben Jones is the Gordon and Llura Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship, a Professor of Strategy, and the faculty director of the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. An economist by training, Professor Jones studies the sources of economic growth in advanced economies, with an emphasis on innovation, entrepreneurship, and scientific progress.  He also studies global economic development, including the roles of education, climate, and national leadership in explaining the wealth and poverty of nations.  His research has appeared in journals such as Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review, and has been profiled in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and The New Yorker.

Linda Broadbelt

Linda Broadbelt is the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor and Associate Dean for Research at McCormick, whose research and teaching interests include multiscale modeling, complex kinetics modeling, environmental catalysis, novel biochemical pathways, and polymerization/depolymerization kinetics. Broadbelt’s research group focuses on understanding complexity in reacting systems by developing capabilities to facilitate quantitative analysis and description of complex systems at the macroscopic level, and by devising strategies and applying tools for probing and quantifying molecular-level events.

V.S. Subrahmanian

V.S. Subrahmanian is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science with a joint appointment as faculty fellow at the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Subrahmanian is a world leader in logical reasoning with uncertainty, probabilistic logics, temporal probabilistic logics, and managing huge, heterogeneous databases with incomplete and inconsistent information, and multimedia databases. In recent years, he has developed scalable methods to apply probabilistic models to a wide variety of real-world scenarios. He created the field of computational cultural dynamics with a suite of novel methods to analyze the behaviors of various terrorist groups, and has since applied these methods to a variety of problems including predicting the stability of nations, predicting when protests will turn violent, predicting systemic banking crises in countries, predicting spread of malware in countries, predicting health care outcomes and in manufacturing.