The four-week summer program has students build real products and take them to market, often earning preorders or revenue.

LaunchX founder Laurie Stach started the for-profit youth entrepreneurship program in 2012 to help high school students build practical skills by launching real companies. The intensive four-week summer program pushes student teams to identify a problem, build a product or service, and take it to market, often generating preorders or revenue before the session ends.

Stach grew up in Texas and the Carolinas, studied mechanical engineering at MIT, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. She ran the first LaunchX summer program on MIT’s campus with 30 students in 2013, and the effort snowballed. LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs.

For builders and operators, LaunchX demonstrates a model for teaching product development and commercialization in a compressed timeline. Students form teams, define a problem, and rapidly iterate until they have a real product or service they can sell. The program’s success shows that hands-on, market-facing learning can work for highly motivated young people.

LaunchX has grown from a 30-student on-campus experiment to a 500-student program with online delivery. The growth shows a trajectory from single-site to multi-format delivery. Operators building similar programs should watch how LaunchX balances in-person intensity with the reach of remote formats.

What matters

• LaunchX started in 2013 with 30 students and now serves about 500 students each year.
• The program gives teenagers hands-on practice in forming startups and bringing products to market.
• Founder Laurie Stach expects the program to keep expanding beyond its current in-person and online formats.

Why it matters

Founder Laurie Stach expects the program to keep expanding beyond its current in-person and online formats.

This GenAI News article was prepared in original wording using reporting and materials published by MIT Technology Review AI. Source reference: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/25/1140911/launching-youth-entrepreneurship/.

Drafted by the GenAI News review pipeline.