Today’s consumers are no longer just end users in the supply chain of a revenue generating widget. Disruptions in technology, marketing, payment, analytics, and demographics have made consumers simultaneously customers, critics, promoters, brand managers, beta testers, and entrepreneurs in their own right. The 2016 MIT Consumer Dynamics Conference will explore the ongoing transformation of consumers in the digital era, reinventing best practices across industries from finance and marketing to manufacturing and medicine.
Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.
In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.
He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Senior Industrial Liaison Officer MIT Office of Corporate Relations/Industrial Liaison Program
Tony Knopp, a native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where he lived for eighteen years, joined the Industrial Liaison Program at MIT in May 1997. He spent fifteen years in operations management positions in healthcare. Prior to this he has worked as a chef and with youth groups and senior citizens in New York City. Tony is married with two children, a daughter and a son.
J.J. Laukaitis joined the Industrial Liaison Program in 2012 and is a strong believer in the amplifying power that comes from building enduring relationships between industry leaders and MIT researchers and innovators.
J.J. has over 25 years of experience in engineering, product management and commercial sales management across multiple industries including mechanical design and manufacturing, electronics, semiconductor equipment, health care IT and renewable energy.
In his work for PTC, Continuum, Teradyne, DFT Microsystems and GE, J.J. has managed programs to conceive, design and launch new products and services and has led major initiatives to transform customer information into insight for revenue growth.
The past few decades have witnessed dramatic changes in how businesses reach, engage, understand and, ultimately, influence consumers. Much has changed from the time when TV and print advertising, focus groups, price off promotion and brand switching set the agenda for business to consumer interaction. Advances in marketing theory and analytical methods have exploited the radical developments of UPC, big data and computational power. The unprecedented rise of the internet, proliferation of mobile devices and popularity of social media have brought about massive changes in trust and consumer empowerment. New developments in deep learning and advertising and website morphing now offer state of the art examples of fresh opportunities to communicate with customers in their individual cognitive style - true consumer-driven marketing in the future.
David Austin Professor in Management, Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Emeritus Dean Emeritus; Chairman, MIT Center for Digital Business MIT Sloan School of Management
Glen Urban is the David Austin Professor in Management, Emeritus, Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, Dean Emeritus, and Chair of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Urban concentrates on the fascinating area of trust-based marketing on the Internet. In particular, he explores how trust is built on a website, how site design can maximize sales and trust, and how a trust-based marketing system could provide an alternative to the “push” type of marketing commonly observed. His current research focuses on customer advocacy. Urban’s new Theory A aligns the firm as a representative of customers’ needs and leads to transparency, unbiased advice, trusted advisors, and best products. His recent research concentrates on morphing a website to fit individual cognitive and cultural style.
Urban holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin as well as a PhD in marketing from Northwestern University.
New digital technologies, pervasive social media and countless apps have transformed the traditional B to C marketing templates. Now, businesses and consumers can increasingly co-create content, experiences and value. And often these collaborations yield persuasive results. But to achieve this brand leverage, businesses have to be willing to give up some control and also engage, creatively, with customers on a more personal level. Under what circumstances does it make sense for business to loosen brand control and what energy and investment is required of consumers to enable co-creation to make an impact? Similarly, what needs to be considered as we enter the world of co-decision making, in which customers have to allow apps to control selection and decisions?
Senior Lecturer Research Scientist MIT Sloan School of Management
Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants, an MIT “Iron Professor,” and a scholar at the MIT Center for Digital Business.
Her main interest is in how status-based bias and technology affect self-perceptions and behavior. Her research projects include: the positive impact of imitation on brand strength, the effect of social media storytelling on persuasion, the role of status dynamics in health and performance, and the use of wearable technology to aid willpower. In order to address these issues rigorously, she employs experimental methodology, both in the field and laboratory.
Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.
Gosline received her undergraduate and graduate training at Harvard University, including a Doctorate from the Harvard Business School.
Bitcoin became a buzzword overnight. It pops up in headlines and fuels endless media debate. Cryptocurrency and the “blockchain” technology behind it holds the promise of a financial system without middlemen—it could put that system in the control of the people who use it and safeguard them from a 2008-type crash. More than a digital form of currency, this technology could integrate billions of hitherto excluded people into the global economy, restore individuals’ control over their private data and identities, and change the way organizations and business relationships are governed.
Senior Advisor for Blockchain Opportunities, Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) MIT Media Laboratory
Michael Casey is a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. He and his colleagues are seeking to build awareness around digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology, helping shape scholarship around the topic and exploring dedicated research projects that use this emerging technology to achieve social impact goals.
Before joining MIT, Michael was a senior columnist covering global finance at The Wall Street Journal, where he culminated a two-decade career in print journalism that spanned various roles and stints on five continents. He also hosted online TV shows for WSJ Live and frequently appeared on various networks as a commentator, including CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, and the BBC. He recently revived his involvement with media, taking on a role as Chairman of the Advisory Board at blockchain news outlet CoinDesk and this year founded his own media company, Streambed Media, which focuses on themes of innovation and society.
Michael is the author of five books on the digital economy and Internet culture. In 2015, he and co-author Paul Vigna published the critically acclaimed The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order and three years later published its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He has also collaborated with documentary filmmakers on the same topic and is frequently called on to speak about these issues at conferences and other public events.
Michael has written three other books: The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, which he co-wrote with social media entrepreneur Oliver Luckett, The Unfair Trade: How our Broken Global Financial System Destroys the Middle Class, an analysis of the global dimensions of the 2008 financial crisis, and Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, about the famous photo of Ernesto "Che" Guevara by Alberto Korda.
A native of Perth, Australia, Michael is a graduate of the University of Western in Australia and has higher degrees from Cornell University and Curtin University.
Why is it so difficult to create advertising that people are willing to share with their friends? Based on analysis of recent field tests on YouTube and Twitter, Catherine Tucker will discuss the challenges to marketers seeking to create branded content that will be shared by social media users, particularly those propagators who share other noncommercial content.
Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Professor of Marketing Chair, MIT Sloan Ph.D. Program MIT Sloan School of Management
Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is also Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program.
Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data to improve their operations and marketing, and in the challenges this poses for regulations designed to promote innovation. She has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Generally, most of her research lies in the interface between marketing, economics, and law.
She has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic medical records.
Tucker is associate editor at Management Science and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She teaches MIT Sloan's course on Pricing and the EMBA course "Marketing Management for the Senior Executive." She has received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching as well as being voted "Teacher of the Year" at MIT Sloan.
She holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of Oxford.
ILP members, many of them Fortune 1000 companies, increasingly want to meet with MIT startups, to scout, to discuss, to partner, to invest, and more. Responding to that need, ILP’s Startup Initiative will boost our current database of near 1000 MIT startups. Going forward, the intent is to provide a web platform to gather real time developments, advertise opportunities and do more but also better matching. We are currently seeking feedback from the wider MIT innovation ecosystem on how we should proceed. There will be a stand at the Startup Exhibit where we can take questions and you can give your input. We're looking for input from both MIT startups and ILP members.
Trond heads up the Startup Initiative at MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), facilitating productive relationships between industry and MIT’s startup ecosystem. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Trond is a serial entrepreneur with Scandinavian roots, and is currently the Founder of Yegii, Inc., the insight network, and Managing Director of Tautec Consulting.
Trond is a leading expert on technology development across industries such as IT, Energy, and Healthcare. His knowledge spans entrepreneurship, strategy frameworks, policy making, action learning, virtual teamwork, knowledge management, standardization, and e-government. He wrote the book Leadership From Below (2008). Trond speaks six languages and is a frequent public speaker on business, technology, and wine.
Trond was a Strategy/business development executive at Oracle Corp. (2008-12), and a policy maker in the EU (2004-8) where he built the ePractice.eu web platform with 120,000 members. He has worked with multinational companies, with mid-caps and startups in Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has a PhD in Multidisciplinary Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Today’s consumers are better equipped with access to information than any in history, but we don’t always use that information at critical moments. By leveraging the power of augmented reality and the techniques that advertisers use to influence consumers, our personal devices can become personal coaches, not only helping inform our decisions but helping improve our decisions. By playing an expanded role in day-to-day decision-making, smart phones and wearable technologies can encourage consumers towards less impulsive, more deliberate, and ultimately more satisfying choices.
Professor of Media Technology Academic Head, Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) Head, Fluid Interfaces Group MIT Media Lab
Pattie Maes is a professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directs the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces research group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She has received several awards: FastCompany named her one of 50 most influential designers (2011). Newsweek magazine named her one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in the year 2000; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the Cyber-Elite, the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. She also received an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her 2009 TED talk is among the most watched TED talks ever. In addition to her academic endeavors, Maes has been active as an entrepreneur as cofounder of several venture-backed companies including Firefly Networks (sold to Microsoft) and Open Ratings (sold to Dun & Bradstreet). She remains an advisor and investor to several MIT spinoffs.
Empowered by ubiquitous information technology, the generation that has come of age in the digital era has learned a very different consumer experience than their parents. From media and financial services to hospitality and transportation, Millennials expect flexibility and responsiveness across sectors to customize their transactions to fit their needs as individuals. Those expectations may only grow as the exchange of data between consumers and sellers continues expanding, fostering even greater personalization through the emergence of bioproducts.
Federico is Executive Vice President of Design at Samsung Electronics. He heads the Samsung Design Innovation Center (SDIC) in San Francisco CA Next-Generation Experience Planning Team in Seoul and Experience and Insights teams within Samsung Research. Federico leads global multidisciplinary teams in the USA Asia and Europe to design new generation of experiences and envision future products. As a designer innovator and social scientist he focuses on the impact of networked digital technologies on human behavior and society and designs products services and meaningful experiences to improves people’s lives. Before joining Samsung Federico was an Associate Professor of the Practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teaching at MIT and MIT Media Lab. He also founded and directed the MIT Design Lab and the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. He previously worked at Motorola Inc. and Philips Design envisioning and creating innovative product experiences. He has been awarded honorary professorships at the Glasgow School of Art University of Glasgow and the Jiangnan University School of Design in Wuxi China. He has published several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals along with books and articles and he has won several awards for his design and innovation work. Federico earned the PhD degree in Sociology of Culture and Communication from the Sorbonne University Paris V with a focus on mediated communication and social interaction in networked communities and smart cities.
Exhibitors Cadnexus Celect Cogito DataXylo Dmetrics DoDoc Formlabs Humatics Luminoso Netvirta Relativity6 Sosolimited Sourcemap
Making your mark in the multi-billion dollar global sports industry is a challenge. So how do teams like the Red Sox and the Dallas Cowboys drive revenue? They create powerhouse brands that attract, engage, and retain fans by leveraging big data, creating cross-platform media and engagement plans, and using dynamic social media strategies to maximize live event experiences. Using theoretical and real-world examples, Ben Shields will share innovative best practices from the business of sports that are relevant to any consumer-driven enterprise.
Ben Shields is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies the multibillion-dollar sports industry to identify broadly transferable management lessons in areas such as leadership communication, data-driven decision making, and innovation.
He is the author or coauthor of three books, Social Media Management: Persuasion in Networked Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High Performance Industry (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace (McGraw-Hill, 2006).
He teaches a number of courses in the graduate programs at MIT Sloan, including Communication for Leaders, Social Media Management, Sloan Fellows Seminar on Leadership, and a new course on sports management and analytics that will be offered in spring 2020.
Shields also teaches in the MIT Sloan Executive Education program. He is the Faculty Director of two programs: the Formula 1 Extreme Innovation Series and the Global Executive Academy. He also serves as the CoFaculty Director of the LEAD20@MIT program with the Ruderman Family Foundation. In addition, he created and teaches the open enrollment program Analytics Management: Business Lessons from the Sports Data Revolution. Shields also teaches in two other open enrollment programs: Communication and Persuasion in the Digital Age and Maximizing Your Personal Productivity.
His other sports work at MIT includes co-hosting “Counterpoints,” the sports analytics podcast from the MIT Sloan Management Review, and teaching in the MIT Sports Entrepreneurship Bootcamp program, which is offered through MIT’s Office of Open Learning.
Prior to MIT, Shields served as the Director of Social Media and Marketing at ESPN. He oversaw social media strategy for the ESPN brand and collaborated across the enterprise to develop and implement company-wide social strategy. He also worked on marketing strategy for several ESPN brands and sub-brands, including the SportsCenter “DaDaDa” campaign and the Emmy Award-winning “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” brand campaign.
Shields holds a BS and MA in communication studies and a PhD in media, technology, and society, all from Northwestern University.
William F Pounds Professor of Management Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management MIT Sloan
Perakis teaches courses and performs research on analytics, optimization, dynamic pricing, revenue management, and supply chain, among others. At MIT over the years, she has taught in a variety of programs such as MBA, EMBA, undergraduate, MSc, and PhD programs across MIT. For her teaching, Perakis won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award in 2002 as well as the Jamieson Prize in 2014 for excellence in teaching and the Teacher of the Year award (among all faculty at the MIT Sloan School) in 2017.In her research, she investigates the theory and practice of analytics. She is particularly interested on how to solve complex and practical problems in pricing, revenue management, supply chains, logistics and energy applications among others. Perakis has widely published in some of the flagship journals of the field such as Operations Research, Management Science, POM, Mathematics of Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming, among others.She has received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the PECASE Award from the Office of the President on Science and Technology. In 2016, she was elected as an INFORMS Fellow, a group that recognizes individuals for lifetime achievement to the field. In addition to the above, her work has received recognition with awards such as the TSL Best Paper Award, the Best Paper competition of the Informs Service Science Section several times, as well as Best Application of Theory Award from NEDSI (Northeast Decision Sciences Institute) Conference. Her work on promotions with the Oracle RGBU was a finalist at the Practice Award of the RMP Section of INFORMS in 2015. In addition, her work on predicting demand for new products that was tested with Johnson and Johnson won first place at the Applied Research Challenge Competition in 2018.
Perakis has a passion for supervising PhD, master’s, and undergraduate students, and builds lifelong relationships with them. So far, she has graduated twenty-one PhD and forty-eight master’s students. In 2012, she received the Samuel M. Seegal Award for inspiring student to achieve excellence.
From 2009 to July 2015, Perakis served as the Sloan faculty CoDirector of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO, former LFM) Program at MIT (joint program between the Sloan School and the School of Engineering). She has also served as the group head of the Operations Management group at MIT Sloan School from 2010-2017. Currently, she is serving as the faculty director of the Executive MBA (EMBA) program at MIT Sloan.She also currently serves as an associate editor for the flagship journals of the field: Management Science, Operations Research, MSOM, the INFORMS Journal on Optimization, and as a senior editor for POM. She has served as the chair of the RMP Section of INFORMS and as the VP of Meetings of the MSOM Society of INFORMS. Perakis holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Athens, as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University.
Retailers know it is crucial to optimize the timing and promotion of sales to maximize profit. But how do you process the large amounts of data necessary to determine optimal pricing and timing? Left to the intuition of product managers, retailers risk missing out, but a new method created by Georgia Perakis and her team of PhD students in collaboration with Oracle RGBU, aims to change that. Using models that analyze price effects, promotion effects, and general consumer behavior data, this approach has the potential to help retailers increase their profits by an average of 3-10 percent. In a world of slim profit margins and ever-increasing competition, this could be a game changer for retailers in any industry.
Today’s consumers want to know more about the goods they purchase and where they come from than ever before. Concerns over issues like fair trade and sustainability are driving many companies, from fledgling startups to industry mainstays, toward radical transparency around sourcing, yet this move isn’t just about brand management. Case studies from the apparel, food, and electronics industries reveal the benefits of better visualization and greater transparency for the whole supply chain, because you can’t improve what you can’t see — but it can still cost you.
Dr. Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of Sourcemap, the supply chain transparency platform. Leading brands and manufacturers use Sourcemap software to trace their products to the source and ensure that corporate standards are met every step of the way, including zero-deforestation, zero-child labor, and the highest standards for raw materials such as recycled, fair trade and organic. You can see Timberland and The North Face, Mars and Hershey, all publishing their Sourcemap-verified supply chains on open.sourcemap.com, the world's largest supply chain disclosure website. Leo developed Sourcemap as part of his PhD at the MIT Media Lab and has been named among America's 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics and America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs.
Rapid urbanization and increasing population density in megacities poses unique challenges for last-mile distribution in many of the world’s largest emerging markets. Meeting these challenges requires understanding shifting consumer expectations and the evolution of omni-channel retail and delivery in city environments. These insights can help companies leverage logistics big data analytics for last-mile network design and planning to reach customers on their own terms, where they live, work, shop, or play, anywhere on the globe.
Director, MIT Megacity Logistics Lab Research Scientist MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics
Matthias Winkenbach is the Director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab and a Research Associate at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. His current research focuses on multi-tier distribution network design in the context of urban logistics and last-mile delivery, urban freight policy and infrastructure design, as well as data analytics and visualization in an urban logistics context. Dr. Winkenbach received his Ph.D. in Logistics and his Masters in Business with specializations in Finance and Economics at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. He also studied at NYU Stern School of Business in New York as well as at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) in Montréal, Canada. His doctoral studies focused on the optimal design of multi-tier urban delivery networks with mixed fleets. His work was closely linked to a research project with the French national postal operator La Poste.
During and after his doctoral studies, he spent several months at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Winkenbach’s previous professional work includes working with Volkswagen in South Africa on local sourcing and cost optimization, with Deutsche Telekom in Germany on co-investment models for network infrastructure expansions, with McKinsey & Company in the United States, and in Germany on organizational redesign in the automotive industry and on innovative delivery models in the postal and express logistics sector, as well as various other projects in the mining, shipbuilding, consulting and logistics industries.
Dr. Winkenbach won the Science Award for Supply Chain Management of the German Logistics Association (BVL) in 2014, was amongst the finalists for the 2015 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, and recently published academic papers in Transportation Science, and Interfaces, as well as some practitioner oriented pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Sloan Management Review. During and after his doctoral studies, he spent several months at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Winkenbach’s previous professional work includes working with Volkswagen in South Africa on local sourcing and cost optimization, with Deutsche Telekom in Germany on co-investment models for network infrastructure expansions, with McKinsey & Company in the United States, and in Germany on organizational redesign in the automotive industry and on innovative delivery models in the postal and express logistics sector, as well as various other projects in the mining, shipbuilding, consulting and logistics industries.
Dr. Winkenbach won the Science Award for Supply Chain Management of the German Logistics Association (BVL) in 2014, was amongst the finalists for the 2015 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, and recently published academic papers in Transportation Science, and Interfaces, as well as some practitioner oriented pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Sloan Management Review.