MIT Sloan faculty are developing deep insights into the convergence of technology, digitization, globalization, and innovative corporate strategy. This popular conference offers a program that blends technological savvy, results-oriented management solutions, and global business know-how. How do you stitch together multiple disparate sources of data even when the data you have on an individual customer is sparse? How must we rethink the integration of minds, machines, products, and platforms? What must an organization do to ameliorate the glass ceiling? How can you implement human centered operations strategies and what will it mean for your bottom line? Do you know how to monetize your data? How can you insulate your organization against volatile markets? Join MIT Sloan faculty to engage in valuable dialogue, gain practical insights on how to remain productive and competitive, and learn how to stay relevant when your business is constantly at risk of disruption.
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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.
David Schmittlein joined the MIT Sloan School of Management as John C Head III Dean in October, 2007. His focus, since arriving on campus, has been to broaden MIT Sloan's global visibility, work with the faculty to create new high-quality management education programs, develop enhanced educational opportunities for current students, and to develop and disseminate business knowledge that has impact and will stand the test of time. He has also reached out to the many members of MIT's alumni community to gain their valuable insights on MIT Sloan and management education.
Prior to his appointment at MIT Sloan, Dean Schmittlein served on the faculty at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1980 until 2007. While at Wharton, he was the Ira A. Lipman Professor and Professor of Marketing. He also served as Interim Dean during July 2007 and as Deputy Dean from 2000-2007. In addition, he was chair of the editorial board for Wharton School Publishing. Dean Schmittlein received a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Business from Columbia University and B.A. in Mathematics (magna cum laude) from Brown University. His research assesses marketing processes and develops methods for improving marketing decisions. He is widely regarded for his work estimating the impact of a firm's marketing actions, designing market and survey research, and creating effective communication strategies.
Dr. Schmittlein has served as a consultant on these issues for numerous firms, e.g. American Express, American Home Products, AT&T, Bausch & Lomb, Boston Scientific, Ford Motor Company, Gianni Versace S.p.A., Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, Revlon, Siebe PLC, The Oakland Raiders, The Quaker Oats Co., and Time Warner. He has over forty publications, most in leading journals in Marketing, Management, Economics and Statistics. He has been an area editor for Marketing Science and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters and Marketing Science.
Dr. Schmittlein serves on the International Advisory Board for Groupe HEC; the Governing Board of the Indian School of Business; the International Advisory Board of Lingnan (University) College of Sun Yat-sen University; the Advisory Board for the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University; the International Advisory Board for the School of Management, Fudan University; and the Board of Trustees of The Conference Board. He has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Marketing and Branding. He has been a visiting professor in the Faculty of Economics at Tokyo University, and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Washington University's John M. Olin School of Business. He has received awards for his research, his editorial work, and his teaching. His observations and research have been cited often in the popular press, including Advertising Age, Business 2.0, Business Week, China.com, Computerworld, Fortune, NPR's Marketplace, People's Daily Online, Reuters, The ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report and USA Today. For more than 30 years, Dr. Schmittlein has done extensive consulting work for corporate clients in a wide variety of industries, including consumer products, computer software, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, manufacturing, and management consulting. For a full list of Dr. Schmittlein's consulting work, visit his corporate consulting engagements page.
Dr. Schmittlein is a member of the American Statistical Association and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Andrew McAfee is the Co-Director of the IDE and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management,
His research investigates how information technology changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also focuses on how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce. In addition to having numerous papers published, McAfee also writes a widely read blog, which is at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 articles, case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. Prior to joining MIT Sloan, McAfee was a professor at Harvard Business School. He has also served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. McAfee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world.
How does the work of running a successful company change when:
Drawing on insights from Machine | Platform | Crowd, his most recent book with Erik Brynjolfsson, Dr. McAfee will address these and other questions. He'll provide a vision, sure to spark lively discussion, of what successful companies will look like as we move deeper into a time of brilliant technologies.
Robert N Noyce Career Development Associate Professor of Operations Management MIT Sloan School of Management
Vivek is interested in the development of new methodologies for large scale dynamic optimization and applications in revenue management, finance, marketing and healthcare. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007 and has been at MIT since, where he is the Robert N. Noyce Professor of Management. Vivek is a recipient of an IEEE Region 6 Undergraduate Student Paper Prize (2002), an INFORMS MSOM Student Paper Prize (2006), an MIT Solomon Buchsbaum Award (2008), an INFORMS JFIG paper prize twice (2009, 2011), the NSF CAREER award (2011), MIT Sloan’s Outstanding Teacher award (2013), and the INFORMS Simulation Society Best Publication Award (2014). Outside of academia, he contributed to the design of the algorithmic trading strategies of GMO's (a USD 100B + money manager) first high frequency venture and in 2014 co-founded a retail technology company.
How do you stitch together multiple disparate sources of data on your customers? How do you do this when the data you have on an individual customer is sparse? Join Professor Vivek Farias to hear about how Slice Learning can be used to learn from sparse, multivariate data. This new paradigm has broad ranging applications, from medical imaging to content personalization.
School of Management Distinguished Associate Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies Director, MIT Executive MBA MIT Sloan School of Management
Nelson P. Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Repenning currently serves as the faculty director for the MIT Executive MBA program. His work focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, and improvement of business processes.
Repenning has received several awards for his work, including best paper recognition from both the California Management Review and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. In 2003 he received the International System Dynamics Society’s Jay Wright Forrester award, which recognizes the best work in the field in the previous five years. In 2011 he received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. His current interests include safety in high hazard production environments and the connection between efficient internal operations and effective strategic positions.
Repenning holds a B.A. in economics from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in operations management and system dynamics from MIT.
Most organizations are good at designing static work. They can draw the org chart, determine how work moves from one machine to the next, and set internal policies. Dynamic Work Design focuses on matching the skills and capabilities of workers to their work. Professor Nelson Repenning will discuss the value of Dynamic Work Design and how it can impact the engagement and success of your employees.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
MIT Startup Exchange maintains a propriety database of over 1,500 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.
STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 230 member companies.
MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.
Jose Chan, VP of Business Development, Celect Aaron Howell, Chief Customer Officer, Relativity6 Abhi Yadav, CEO & Founder, ZyloTech Jon Garrity, Founder & CEO, Tagup Rony Kubat, Co-Founder, Tulip Glynnis Kearney, VP of Product & Strategy, Gamalon Joshua Feast, Co-Founder & CEO, Cogito Vinayak Ranade, CEO, Drafted Kalpesh Sheth, Co-Founder & CEO, Yaxa Molly Bales, Chief Development Officer, Adappt Intelligence Aidan Cardella, SVP of Operations, TVision Matt Osman, CEO and Co-Founder, Legit Patents Anjali Midha, CEO and Co-Founder, Diesel Labs
Zeynep Ton is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Zeynep's research focuses on how organizations can design and manage their operations in a way that satisfies employees, customers, and investors simultaneously. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and the Harvard Business Review.
In 2014, Zeynep published her findings in a book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. The book draws on 15 years of research to show that the key to offering good jobs to employees, great service to customers, and superior returns to investors is combining investment in employees with specific operational choices that increase employees’ productivity, contribution, and motivation.
After her book was released, company executives started reaching out to Zeynep to understand how to implement the Good Jobs Strategy in their organizations, or to describe how they were already adopting the strategy. Zeynep cofounded the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute to help them transform through assessments, workshops, and longer term partnerships.
Prior to MIT Sloan, Zeynep spent seven years at Harvard Business School. She has received several awards for teaching excellence both at HBS and MIT Sloan.
Zeynep lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. A native of Turkey, she first came to the US on a volleyball scholarship from the Pennsylvania State University. She received her BS in industrial and manufacturing engineering there and her DBA from the Harvard Business School.
Just paying employees well isn’t enough. For a business to succeed it must have operational procedures that allow for high productivity and empower employees to contribute to a company’s success. Professor Zeynep Ton will discuss the importance of a human-centered operations strategy and how operational innovation can increase the productivity and contributions of workers and create positive outcomes where customers become fans and your organization is set up for success.
Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management Associate Member, Broad Institute MIT Sloan School of Management
Benjamin Roin is an Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute.
Ben’s work focuses on entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and innovation policy. His primary areas of research are patent law, biopharmaceutical innovation, and government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. He has written about the market-exclusivity protections available for old and repurposed drugs, the implications of the finite patent term and limited patent-term extensions for drug-development strategy, public and private insurer reimbursement policies, and Hatch-Waxman litigation. In 2013, he received the Kauffman/iHEA Award for Health Care Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research (along with Eric Budish and Heidi Williams). In addition to his academic research, he currently works with the Institute of Medicine, National Health Council, and the Multi-Regional Clinical Trial Center on issues related to patent law, FDA law, clinical-trial regulations, and pharmaceutical innovation policy.
Prior to joining the MIT Sloan faculty in 2014, Ben was the Hieken Assistant Professor of Patent Law at Harvard Law School, where he taught courses on patent law, trade secrecy, university technology transfer, and torts. Before joining the Harvard Law School Faculty in 2008, he was an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Michael McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He received his BA from Amherst College in 2000 and his JD from Harvard Law School in 2005.
How do you take a patent from a place of weakness to a place of strength? How can you make sure that the right people are making the decisions about what to patent? Should patents be based on technology or is it more effective to approach patents from the business side? Join Professor Ben Roin to discuss strategies for creating powerful patents that will better protect your intellectual property.
Dr. Donald Sull is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he directs the Strategic Agility Project and the Culture 500. He teaches courses on competitive strategy and strategy execution, and was a member of the committee that designed MIT's Master of Business Analytics program.
Sull was formerly a Professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School, and earned his bachelors, masters, and doctorate at Harvard University. Prior to academia, he worked as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a management-investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.
The Economist named him “a rising star in a new generation of management gurus” and identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century. Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus. He has published five books and over 100 cases and articles, including a dozen best-selling Harvard Business Review articles.
Sull is the co-founder and CEO of CultureX, which leverages proprietary AI to measure and improve corporate culture. He is the chairman of FilmFish and an advisor to several start-ups including Betterworks, Tomorrow.io, and eToro. He has advised top teams of more than fifty Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as non-business organizations ranging from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).
How can you insulate your organization against volatile markets? What steps can you take to ensure you respond to turbulence with agility? Competing and succeeding in volatile markets relies on a mix of agility and absorption. Professor Donald Sull will discuss how agility and absorption can function as complements (even though many of their structural factors may seem diametrically opposed) and how getting the right mix can increase the effectiveness of these approaches during volatile times.
John Carrier is a senior lecturer in the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Managing Director of 532 Partners. His expertise is in shaping the dynamics of operating environments to improve productivity, quality, safety, and morale simultaneously. He has helped companies save hundreds of millions of dollars by helping them find and eradicate the hidden systems lurking inside every operation. His current focus is to help prepare companies to compete in the new environment of Industry 4.0.
He has educated over five hundred top-level leaders in the MIT Sloan Executive Education program in Oil & Gas, petrochemicals, mining, and healthcare. When not teaching, he spends most of his time in the operating environment, working directly with the front line to deliver measurable results in less than sixty days.
Dr. Carrier holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D. in Control Systems from MIT, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
As in chess, the most perilous part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) transition is the “middle game” – where the number of options to choose from is highest, yet visibility into the consequences of any individual decision or action is at its lowest. Fortunately, there are over fifty years of theory and experience in System Dynamics to help you make consistently better decisions as you lead your organization through the “quagmire of execution.” Join John Carrier to learn the fundamental system principles for managing the hundreds of “small decisions” that will ultimately determine the outcome of your IIoT initiative. Carrier will also highlight the cultural aspects of technological adoption within the context of an existing operation.
William F Pounds Professor of Management Professor of Organization Studies Co-Director, Economic Sociology Ph.D Program MIT Sloan School of Management
Roberto M. Fernandez is the William F. Pounds Professor in Management and a Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Fernandez currently serves as the co-director of the Economic Sociology PhD Program and served as the head of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences area from 2008-2010. His research focuses on the areas of organizations, social networks, and race and gender stratification. Fernandez has extensive experience doing field research in organizations, including an exhaustive five-year case study of a plant retooling and relocation. His current research focuses on the organizational processes surrounding the hiring of new talent using data collected in 14 organizations. He is the author of more than 50 articles and research papers published in top academic journals in his field.
Fernandez holds a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
For years’ gender inequality has been prevalent in the work force. Numerous studies have examined these patterns of gender inequality in organizational advancement but findings have been less clear on the mechanisms that produce these descriptive patterns. How can we further research in this area? How can a manager prevent gender inequality? What must an organization do to ameliorate the glass ceiling? Professor Roberto Fernandez will critically review the research on gender patterns of allocation in organizational hierarchies, and present key findings drawn from his research conducted on this topic over the past 15 years.
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.
There are three major complexities facing those who manage last-mile distribution: increasing density in megacities, increasing fragmentation of urban demand, and ever-increasing customer expectations. How can technology and data improve last-mile logistics? What unique challenges do managers face? How can you understand shifting consumer expectations and the evolution of omni-channel retail and delivery in city environments? Join Matthias Winkenbach to explore how companies can reach customers on their own terms, where they live, work, shop, or play, anywhere on the globe.
Barbara joined MIT Sloan in June 2013 to serve as a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). MIT CISR was established in 1974 as a non-profit research group, and it currently is funded by 85 corporate sponsors and patrons. The center undertakes practical research on how firms generate business value from digitization. Barbara’s work focuses on how organizations effectively deliver value from their information assets.
Prior to MIT CISR, Barbara was a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia (UVA) where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in data management, business analytics, and IT strategy. She is a two-time recipient of the UVA All-University Teaching Award (2002, 2010), which recognizes teaching excellence in professors, particularly those who inspire and motivate students. This honor is especially meaningful to Barbara because she earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia.
Since the mid–90’s, Barbara has deeply explored data warehousing, business intelligence, analytics, big data, and AI. Her research ranges from large-scale surveys and meta-analyses to lab experiments and in-depth case studies. Five of her cases have placed in the Society for Information Management Paper Awards competition: First American Corporation (1999), Owens and Minor (2000), Continental Airlines (2004), Sprint (2008), and BBVA (2018). Barbara is a leading academic scholar, publishing in such journals as Information Systems Research; MIT Sloan Management Review; MIS Quarterly; and MIS Quarterly Executive. She presents her work globally to academic and business audiences.
Barbara serves as associate editor of the Business Intelligence Journal, research fellow of The Data Warehousing Institute, and fellow of the Teradata University Network. In 2017, Barbara was awarded the Teradata University Network Hugh J. Watson Award for her contributions to the data and analytics academic community via the Teradata University Network. She is the author of two leading systems analysis and design textbooks, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. She is married and blessed with two daughters.
The possession of rich amounts of data is hardly unique in today’s world. But the ability to monetize data effectively — and not simply hoard it — can be a source of competitive advantage in the digital economy. Join Professor Barb Wixom to discuss three ways to monetize your data: (1) improving internal business processes and decisions to get process lift, (2) wrapping information around core products and services to get product lift, and (3) selling information offerings to new and existing markets. Each method offers unique capabilities and commitments that may not work for every corporation.
Principal Research Scientist Director, Center for Information Systems Research MIT Center for Information Systems Research
Jeanne Ross is a recognized expert in enterprise architecture. Her book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy (2006), was recently named by Forbes magazine as one of 13 must-read books for technology executives. Jeanne’s current research focuses on how established companies will transform themselves for success for the digital economy. She has helped bring architecture into senior management strategy discussions at companies like Aetna, China Mobile, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, CEMEX, Schneider Electric, and PepsiCo. Jeanne has published in major practitioner and academic journals, including The Wall Street Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review. She is currently writing her fourth book, a follow up to her 2006 book, which will examine architectural requirements for digital companies.
It’s easy to think that digital business success depends on becoming more mobile, social, and analytical. But that barely hints at how digital technologies are changing business. SMACIT (social, mobile, analytics, cloud, internet of things)—and more recent technology arrivals like artificial intelligence, robotics, and biometrics—are ridiculously affordable, easy to use, and powerful. Anyone can acquire and use these technologies—your customers, your employees, your partners, your competitors (and your future competitors). Consequently, you will never generate a competitive edge by simply adopting some digital technology. How will companies create competitive advantage digitally? Speed and integration—the antithesis of what most established companies are designed for. Thus to become more agile and integrated, companies must not only use digital technologies effectively, they must fundamentally redesign themselves. Drawing on examples such as Philips, LEGO, Schneider Electric, and BNY Mellon, we describe how big, old companies are designing themselves for digital success.
Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center Senior Lecturer MIT Sloan School of Management
Hal Gregersen is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he pursues his vocation of executive teaching, coaching, and research by exploring how leaders in business, government, and society discover provocative new ideas, develop the human and organizational capacity to realize those ideas, and ultimately deliver positive, powerful results.
He is a Senior Fellow at Innosight and a former advisory board member at Pharmascience, a privately held pharmaceutical company based in Montreal, Canada. Before joining MIT, he taught at INSEAD, London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Brigham Young University, and in Finland as a Fulbright Fellow.
Gregersen's most recent book, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, flows from a path-breaking international research project (with Jeff Dyer & Clayton Christensen). They explored where disruptive innovations come from by interviewing founder entrepreneurs and CEOs at 100+ of the most innovative companies in the world and by assessing how 8,000+ leaders leverage five key innovation skills to create valuable new products, services, processes, and businesses.
To grasp how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt the world – Gregersen is now studying 100+ renowned business and government leaders. This question-centric project, conducted in collaboration with Clayton Christensen, is surfacing insights into how leaders build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. Gregersen is also founder of The 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation.
Gregersen has co-authored ten books and published over 50 articles, book chapters, and cases on leading innovation and change. His research has been highlighted in global media such as BBC, CNN, The Economist, Fast Company, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He has received several awards for his cutting edge work, including: 2013 Thinkers50 Innovation Award Nominee, 2012 Chartered Management – British Library Book of the Year Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the 2009 McKinsey Award runner-up for the best article in Harvard Business Review.
Putting his research to practice, Gregersen regularly delivers high impact keynote speeches and executive workshops with companies like Accenture, Adidas, AT&T, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Danone, Genentech, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, LG, Lilly, McAfee, Marriott, MasterCard, Sanofi Aventis, SAP, Vivendi, WalMart, World Economic Forum, & Yahoo! He also works with governments, not-for-profit and NGO organizations to generate greater innovation capabilities in the next generation of leaders.
Gregersen has lived and worked outside the United States for over a decade -- in England, Finland, France, and the UAE. He and his wife now reside in Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, painting.
How can you know what you don’t know? What steps can you take to break out of your bubble and see the reality of what’s happening in the world and in your business? Professor Hal Gregersen will discuss concrete ways to help you ask the right questions so that you can gain access to information about your business and break out of the CEO bubble.