Events that include:

Enterprises are increasingly complex, with supply chains, manufacturing, and service delivery processes spanning cultures and time zones, geographies and geopolitical situations. To navigate this intricate world filled with new and different kinds of risk, executives need to know how to make the most efficient use of a company?s material, people, and processes; how to manage more complicated global networks; how to optimize service and quality levels of performance; and how to minimize risks yet maintain required capacities. This program will draw on real issues confronting manufacturing and service companies today, providing strategic frameworks to enable executives to make smart choices so their companies can deliver the high-quality products and services they are committed to providing their customers.

Many participants attend this program along with Supply Chain Strategy and Management.

In this program, senior managers will learn new approaches to operations strategy that were developed at MIT and based on best-practice research conducted among the world's leading service and manufacturing companies. Participants will gain an analytic view of operations and strategic insights into:

• Vertical integration and the factors that affect strategic decisions
• Process design and process engineering
• Integration of people systems with technical systems
• Global facility network strategies and the future of supply chain management
• Strategic implications of process technologies
• Capacity and risk management, including capacity factors, supply and demand management
• Outsourcing, supplier power, and trends in supplier management

In 2013, fourteen of the top 30 global brands by market capitalization were platform-oriented companies – companies that created and now dominate arenas in which buyers, sellers, and a variety of third parties are connected in real time. In today’s networked age, the cloud, social media, and mobile devices are fueling this platform competition, and more and more companies want in. However, many companies do not succeed in becoming platform leaders because their technology and/or business strategies fall short.

While many platform strategies are well known (e.g. Apple’s iTunes), there are other less-heralded platforms that are exploring new ways to create and capture value. These include: dynamic pricing, usage fees, highly targeted product and service offerings, inbound marketing, and network effects.

Key questions the faculty explores include:

• Is a customer segment with the highest “willingness to pay” the most valuable segment?
• When is tying a customer to a platform (sometimes called “lock in”) counter-productive?
• Which pricing formats seem to boost revenues but actually slow platform adoption?
• How can companies get in front of the common evolution patterns of platforms?
• When should leaders be wary of “platform envy?”

Through case studies and Q&A, experienced managers will emerge with insights for refreshing their company’s strategic approach and participating profitably in the multi-sided marketplaces of the future.

By the end of this two-day course, participants should be able to:

• Identify examples of traditional and non-traditional forms of platforms
• Describe the common evolution patterns of multisided platforms, including same-side vs. cross-side network effects
• Identify customer and user groups whose affiliation with the platform is most valuable
• Decide whether to try to “tie” customers to a platform or not – the value of open vs. proprietary networks
• Design strategies to undermine an established platform or to defend against such attacks
• Describe the principles of platform pricing and how to inform the design of an effective pricing format
• Recognize the concrete implications of trade-offs in platform design, governance, and staging
• Decide whether a given value proposition is best developed as a stand-alone platform, or as a complement embedded into another platform’s ecosystem…or whether to pivot away from platform strategies all together.

Led by world experts, this practice-oriented program investigates a robust MIT framework for better managing supply chains in today's rapidly changing markets. Participants will explore:

• The next big trend in supply chain strategy, and the key skills required to be successful
• How to better structure a company's supply-chain strategy
• Guidelines for making strategic sourcing and make-buy decisions
• How to integrate e-business thinking into supply chain strategy and management
• How to blend recent developments in information systems and communication technology with sophisticated decision support systems and create a comprehensive strategy for manufacturing and logistics
• "Clockspeed benchmarking," a tool for deriving critical business insights and management lessons from industries with the highest obsolescence rates of products, process technologies, and organizational structures (industrial "fruit flies")
• How to assimilate sustainability into your supply chain strategy
• Why all advantages in fast clockspeed environments are temporary

Many participants attend this program along with Developing a Leading Edge Operations Strategy.

In the past, supply chain practice has been primarily tactical, but this program presents a new and innovative approach to supply chain design, which will enable program participants to better understand:

• The role of supply chain design in business strategy and why, if not linked, your supply chain design can undo a company's entire business strategy
• Forces that influence supply chain structure?how supply chain structures change; how supply chain structures and industry structures overlap; and how these structures are affected by the speed of change in a given industry
• Integrating supply chain design with product and process development
• Connecting supply chain design with supply chain management and logistics
• Supply chains in the age of e-business

Guest Speaker:
Sheryl Sandberg
Chief Operating Officer
Facebook

Biotherapeutics, particularly antibodies, are currently the fastest growing pharmaceuticals. Ideally, they are formulated in aqueous solutions, often a great challenge due to physical and chemical stability issues. This course addresses those challenges across a range of topics from aggregation to oxidation, deamidation, and hydrolysis. It covers these topics from the basic to the advanced level with an emphasis on modeling. In addition, cutting-edge technologies are described and analyzed. The course as a whole focuses on giving you additional tools and knowledge to help streamline solutions to formulation and stability issues for biologics.

Who Should Attend

This course is targeted for scientists and engineers in biopharmaceutical development. It would also be of interest to those in biomanufacturing, in which stability issues perpetually arise. The course will be of particular benefit to those who wish to enhance their skill in efficiently and effectively addressing stability issues and formulation. Those who should attend include:

• Formulation scientists from beginning to advanced
• Scientists and engineers who are interested in or need to understand stability issues
• Bioprocessing scientists and engineers
• Scientists and engineers interested in physical and chemical processes that occur with biomolecules
• Managers responsible for pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and regulatory affairs

As the demand for high-performance materials with superior properties, flexibility, and resilience grows, a new design paradigm from the molecular scale upwards has revolutionized our ability to create novel materials. This course covers the science, technology, and state-of-the-art in atomistic, molecular, and multiscale modeling, synthesis and characterization. Through lectures and hands-on labs, participants will learn how superior material properties in nature and biology can be mimicked in bioinspired materials for applications in new technology. Bridging multiple hierarchies of length- and time-scales, this course trains participants in applications to polymers, metals and ceramics as well as composites. The course also covers sustainable infrastructure materials such as concrete and asphalt.

This course will focus on practical problem-solving computational tools paired with a detailed discussion of experimental techniques to probe the ultimate structure of materials, emphasizing tools to predict key mechanical properties. Case studies of molecular mechanics, bio-inspired composites, and dynamic fracture of composites and polymers will be presented and carried out by participants in computational labs. Simulation codes, algorithms, and details of the implementations of different simulation technologies, including validation, will be presented, including practical issues such as supercomputing (hardware and software), parallelization, graphics processing computing (GPU), and others. Specific focus is on structural polymers and composites, including innovative material platforms such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, and protein materials for bio-inspired materials. Participants will learn state-of-the-art techniques, such as molecular dynamics and coarse-graining, used to cover a range of length- and time-scales.

Who Should Attend
This course will be of interest to scientists, engineers, managers, and policy makers working in the area of materials design, development, manufacturing, and testing. The program is of particular interest to industries where highly functional materials tailored for specific purposes are needed. The focus on mechanical properties includes domains such as biomaterials and implants, adhesives, construction materials, and structural materials for the aero-astro and automotive industries.

The reactor safety course (one of MIT Professional Education’s longest running summer programs) addresses from a practical point of view the safety and regulatory issues of operating and planned reactors in the US and other countries. Emphasis will be on new developments such as:

• New reactor safety and licensing
• International perspectives on safety
• Risk-informed operations
• Causes of plant outages
• High performance fuel
• Spent fuel storage management
• Emergency planning - course sessions that focus on learning from the Fukushima experience.

A review of recent developments focusing on safety issues in the near-term deployment of new plants, the Generation-IV nuclear system program, and the advanced fuel cycle initiative will be among the topics of discussion. There will be a panel discussion at the end of each day comprised of that day’s lecturers to answer questions.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
The Nuclear Plant Safety course is intended for degree holding engineers and scientists who have some knowledge of nuclear facility technology and who are or will be participating directly in the design, construction, operation, or regulatory safety review of large nuclear installations such as power reactors. It will be of particular interest to technically trained representatives of the electrical power utility industry, Department of Energy facilities, reactor or reactor component fabricators, safety evaluators, and other technically trained personnel interested in obtaining an overall view of reactor safety.

This course presents the functional anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems from an engineering perspective. The goal of the course is to enable engineers and managers from industry to understand the normal cardiorespiratory physiology at the systems level, to predict system behavior under normal operation and pathological stresses, and to understand what commonly monitored clinical signals reveal about the state of the system. Strong emphasis will be placed on describing the cardiovascular system quantitatively, drawing on physical principles and deriving models of cardiovascular and respiratory function that illuminate the organ systems’ operation. The course is structured into these major blocks:

• Functional anatomy of the cardiovascular systems
• Function of the heart and peripheral circulation
• Function of the intact cardiovascular system
• Control of the cardiovascular system
• Physical basis of electrocardiography
• Clinical electrocardiography
• Functional anatomy of the respiratory system
• Respiratory mechanics
• Respiratory gas exchange

The course will be lecture-based, with breakout sessions in small groups to work on hands-on problems that consolidate the concepts presented during lectures. Presentations by clinicians will give insights into how technology is used in current clinical practice.