HUBweek Events Highlight Boston-Area Innovation

From a forum hosted by Michael Sandel to presentations about Boston’s urban design to a party with beer made from water purified from the Charles River, HUBweek is featuring a wide variety of events showcasing Boston-area innovation this week.

HUBweek is a week-long festival that aims to educate Boston residents about new ideas that companies and individuals in the city are developing, cofounder Linda Pizzuti Henry said.

MIT, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston Globe sponsored the week of festivities, which take place from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1. HUBweek began last year and then drew more than 46,000 attendees.

“We’re talking about things that matter, we’re talking about things that really interest people. And we are just getting warmed up,” Henry said.

University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in a statement that the event highlighted opportunities for Harvard to work with the Boston area.

“Harvard’s legacy as a leading research and educational institution means that we are equipped not only to innovate, but to create,” he wrote, through Harvard spokesperson Tania DeLuzuriaga. “HUBweek at Harvard showcases the ways in which we interact to improve and innovate in the communities we share.”

The Faneuil Forum, a discussion led by government professor Michael J. Sandel, drew large crowds Monday evening. Sandel conducted a seminar with members of the public in Faneuil Hall on Monday and asked them to consider the relationship between money and being a good citizen.

“I think that one of the reasons that democracy doesn’t seem to be going to well these days is that we have slid into a certain impoverished understanding of what democracy is for,” he said. “We’ve come to treat citizenship as a kind of extension of market relations.”

Bernd Huber, a computer science graduate student at Harvard, said Sandel made him think about democracy in a new way.

“[Sandel’s approach] makes you think about things that you haven’t spent time thinking about,” he said.

At another HUBweek event entitled “Diversity in Medicine,” panelists discussed ways to attract healthcare professions from a variety of demographic backgrounds.

Teresa J. Carter, who works at Harvard Medical School’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Community Partnership, said she enjoyed the event.

“The panelists were very informative,” she said. “It was good to see a good cross-section [of diversity] in the panelists.”