Co-sponsored by MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Imperial Business Partners, Imperial College London Powered by
The world is becoming more hyper-connected and complex with challenges for new service and product development. How might we map innovation, its implementation, and its success in this new reality? Can we use this connectivity for good to enable individualised, customised and inclusive innovations through the use of AI and other technologies? How will this impact our personal lives and work experiences? How will new insights from behavioral and biological data change the way we personalize services while respecting privacy? We have seen positive shifts to the current innovation paths which have allowed more streamlined paths from ideation to solution. What might be ways your business can enable better innovation journeys? The 2019 MIT-Imperial 'Innovation Journeys' Conference, jointly hosted by BT, the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Imperial Business Partners, Imperial College London, will bring together academics, industry leaders, and MIT and Imperial college startups to explore and share how innovation is born, routed through an organisation, fostered, expanded, and adapted over time to enable an individualised workforce, consumer, and world.
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.
Simon joined Imperial in 2009 with 14 years' corporate experience in the automotive and electronic sectors, having worked for Ford Motor and Visteon. Simon holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Senior Lecturer MIT Gordon Engineering Leadership Program
Blade is an innovation and user-experience expert, Sr. Lecturer at MIT on Design-Thinking and Innovation, and provides consulting service in Design-Thinking (www.bladekotelly.com), Blade’s consulting services helps top brands to innovate radically on their product and services, and teaches corporate teams how to create solutions that customers love.
Prior to that, Blade led the Advanced Concept Lab at Sonos where he defined the future experience that will fill your home with music. Prior to joining Sonos, Blade was the VP Design & Consumer Experience at Jibo, Inc. where he was in charge of the industrial-design, human-factors, user-interface, brand, packaging, web experience supporting Jibo, the world’s first social robot for the home. Blade has also designed a variety of technologies including ones at Rapid7, an enterprise security-software company, StorytellingMachines, a software firm enabling anyone to make high-impact movies, Endeca Technologies, a search and information access software technology company, Edify and SpeechWorks, companies that provided speech-recognition solutions to the Fortune 1000.
Blade wrote the book on speech-recognition interface design (Addison Wesley, 2003), The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice and his work and thoughts have been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC.
Since 2003, Blade has taught courses on design-thinking. He's a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford University and Harvard University, and holds a Bachelors of Science in Human-Factors Engineering from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Engineering and Management from MIT.
When it comes to innovation, startups can often remain innovative for years, while established companies might need to create innovation initiatives to continue to stay competitive and reach their business goals. But what causes this difference, and how can these companies bridge the gap? Large organizations need to behave differently in order to foster successful innovation approaches, to understand how to take the right kinds of risks, and to create cultural change that will be successful for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, startups need to postpone acting and operating like large organizations to continue to innovate. For companies both large and small to truly disrupt and transform, innovation will require an environment with less adherence to current processes, more input from non-traditional sources, and an increased awareness about how your employees' brain-chemistry is the critical source for success.
Dr. Kennedy's research focuses on the emergence of new markets and industries and the more basic building blocks of organising—categories, identities, forms, strategies, practices, reputation criteria and so on. Within this broad topic, he pays particular attention to meaning construction processes, often by using text-mining techniques to extract and analyze patterns of association among actors, ideas and objects as they appear in conventional and new social media. His publications have appeared in American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.
Dr. Kennedy was educated at Northwestern University and Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. (Joint Program in Management and Organizations and Sociology) and MBA degrees from Northwestern and its Kellogg School of Management and his A.B. in Philosophy (Program in Formal Systems) from Stanford. Before coming to Imperial, Dr. Kennedy was at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.
Dr. Kennedy also has substantial work experience in consulting and high technology. Before becoming an academic, he was a Principal in the management consulting unit of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and, before that, a software engineer and product manager for a Santa Clara, CA-based startup. As a consultant, Professor Kennedy has served clients in technology, healthcare and entertainment on difficult issues at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and organisational change.
Especially in cognitive and administrative work, a job is bag of tasks, and this changes how we should be thinking about using AI in the digital transformation now reshaping organisations.
Outline: A job is a bag of tasks. Over the last generation, the spread of networks and PC-based information systems have transformed administrative work away from the assembly line model adapted from manufacturing assembly lines. Gone are the inboxes and outboxes and trolleys that shuffled intermediate work product from one stage to the next in clerical work processes. In short, cognitive work was reengineered. The benefits were reduced hand-offs and waiting times, and it worked by leverage the plasticity of human minds to integrate tasks people could learn to do in combination. Nowadays, most jobs involving cognitive work are a bag of tasks, and the tasks themselves can be quite heterogenous.
Tools for tasks, not robots for jobs. Thus the idea that robots will automate jobs is misguided, and predictions of job losses through direct substitution of technology for labourt—robots for jobs—are overwrought. Nonetheless, changes to organisations will be profound as new tools become capable of commercial deployment to automate various tasks in our bags of tasks, even if only or a few at a time.
New methods for thinking about organisation design. I’ll share results of work we are doing to analyse job descriptions and narrative accounts of work to identify tasks amenable to automation and estimate the potential impact of new technologies on the demand for labour for work that is being done now. Although this is interesting in its own right, I will then argue that the dramatic impact to come from AI-derived research is from tools that will enhance human creativity and problem solving. Examples from healthcare, legal services, heavy industry, and early stage work in law enforcement.
Discussion. For discussion, implications for theories of the firm, the evolution of organisational forms, and the transformation of current industry ecosystems and platforms.
Rachel started her career as a chartered accountant before moving into IT consultancy. She spent the next 20 years in various IT programme delivery, strategy & architecture and leadership roles with ABN Amro, M&S Money, HSBC, ACE Group (now Chubb) and Vodafone. She has spent much of her working life overseas in NA, LATAM, ASPAC and Europe.
Rachel joined BT in December 2015. As Managing Director for IT she leads BT’s global IT organisation and is responsible for the design, build, run and transformation of the platforms that support all BT’s consumer and enterprise customer journeys and provide insight. Rachel leads BT’s TechWomen programme helping our women reach their potential and was recently awarded the Mentor of the Year Award at the Women of Future Awards and named one of the top 30 global champions of women in business by the Financial Times for her work in this important area.
Rachel believes in the power of art to transform society and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees of FACT, a charity dedicated to using arts and technology to solve social issues and a Trustee of the Creative Folkestone, a charity dedicated to regenerating Folkestone through creative activity.
For an IT organisation to move from evolving in 5-10 year generational leaps to one that continuously evergreens, takes a significant transformation. In this session we will share some of the approaches BT has taken to inspire a culture, mindset and behaviour shift that underpins the wholescale transformation of its IT organisation.
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management's Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of models, prototypes, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation risk and opportunity. He is author of the award-winning book The Innovator’s Hypothesis (MIT Press, 2014), Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and Serious Play (Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). His latest book, Recommendation Engines, was published in September 2020 by MIT Press as part of its Essential Knowledge series. He's done consulting and advisory work for Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, British Telecom, BP, Siemens, Embraer, Google, iRise, the Office of Net Assessment, and other organizations
Schrage has run design workshops and executive education programs on innovation, experimentation, and strategic measurement for organizations all over the world and is currently pioneering work in selvesware technologies designed to augment aspects, attributes, and talents of productive individuals. He is particularly interested in the future co-evolution of expertise, advice, and human agency as technologies become smarter than the people using them.
Georgina is Director of Business Development for the global tech startup, Climacell.co. She is focused on bringing critical weather data to low-income populations and those most vulnerable to climate change. Prior to Climacell, Georgina spent a decade immersed in MIT’s rich innovation ecosystem. She was a Senior Lecturer with the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, & Strategic Management Group at MIT Sloan. Through this role, she developed several new academic courses and co-wrote cases on game-changing leaders and ventures. She also served the community as Executive Director of the MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship and, prior to that, Director of MIT’s Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program. She began her journey at MIT making gecko-inspired surgical adhesives at the MIT Langer Lab and hydrogen-generating nanoparticles at an MIT cleantech spinout. Some of her thoughts on entrepreneurship are captured in pieces recently published in the FT, Entrepreneur.com, and Forbes. She read Material Science at Trinity College Oxford and Technology and Policy at MIT.
Witold Kowalczyk is the Director of European Business Development for Zapata Computing where he’s responsible for implementing and managing the sales & partner activities across Europe.
He’s a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni. Founder & CEO of multiple startups within the AI and quantum tech industry. Founded BOHR Technology, a company working on quantum machine learning algorithms and software for solving complex optimization problems. At BOHR he was in charge of the startup’s growth strategy, product management and international business development.
Annika Monari is a Co-Founder of Aventus, a digital assets-focused blockchain-based protocol that transforms oversight, standardisation, trust and innovation across enterprises’ supply chains by acting as a secure and independent backbone of interoperability, communication and value exchange. Before developing an interest in blockchain and cryptography Annika was involved with experimental particle physics, investigating Higgs Boson Particle decays to dark matter using machine learning in partnership with CERN and gaining experience at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, before completing a Master’s Degree in Physics at Imperial College London. Having co-founded Aventus in 2016, Annika and Co-Founder Alan Vey launched the alpha version of Aventus on the Ethereum test network, established the Aventus Protocol Foundation to develop and market the open-source Aventus protocol, and led the most successful public ticketing Token Generation Event (TGE) which attracted over 1,300 participants and generated over $15m at the time. The Aventus Protocol was made available on the Ethereum network in April 2018.
Alan Vey is a Co-Founder of Aventus, a digital assets-focused blockchain-based protocol that transforms oversight, standardisation, trust and innovation across enterprises’ supply chains by acting as a secure and independent backbone of interoperability, communication and value exchange. Prior to founding Aventus, Alan worked at the Deloitte Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre, before going on to complete a Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London. His thesis focused on film rights distribution, working with Bafta and the BBC. Fast-forward to September 2017 and Alan together with Co-Founder Annika Monari, had released the alpha version of Aventus to a test network, established the Aventus Protocol Foundation to develop and market the open-source Aventus protocol, and led the most successful public ticketing Token Generation Event (TGE) which attracted over 1,300 participants and generated over $15m at the time. The Aventus Protocol was made available on the Ethereum network in April 2018.
Jose co-founded Synbiosys, a materials startup working in the Defence & Security space that is creating thermodynamic armour - a paradigm shift in physical protection not seen since the 1970s when Kevlar pioneered the use of fibres for armour.
He co-founded the Entrepreneurship for Physicists undergraduate lecture course in Imperial College London's Physics department, and is also part of the building of the Hacking for Defense (H4D) classroom at the Institute for Security Science & Technology, Imperial College London.
Before Synbiosys, Jose completed a PhD in Solid State Physics at Imperial College London and helped build the first program for Deep Science Ventures. He has also been involved in various technology startups since a young age, in industries ranging from hydroelectricity to oil & gas sensing.
Tom is the founder and CEO of Rightly, which he started in 2017 with the aim of making control of personal data accessible and beneficial to all. He has 8 years’ experience of working with data across a range of industries, having helped many companies, charities and public sector organisations get more from their data and more recently, navigate their compliance obligations in a changing regulatory climate.
Letizia Gionfrida is Founder and CEO of Arthronica. Arthronica is an artificial intelligence-powered clinical diagnosis platform (Class IIa) that uses laptop/smartphone camera to early diagnose arthritis and track effectiveness of medication. The system allows video consultation and automated assessment of patients progress, indicating adherence of therapeutic and providing suggestions on personalized medicine.
MIT Startup Exchange Companies - ClimaCell: Micro weather, global coverage - Zapata Computing: Algorithms for quantum computing
Imperial College London Connected Startups - Aventus: Open blockchain ticketing - Synbiosys: A new platform for materials research and development - Rightly: Data control - Arthronica: AI-powered clinical diagnosis platform - LYS Technologies: Healthy light
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.
Chris is London’s and Imperials first Regius Professor of Engineering and Founder of Imperial’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering. At 33, he was the youngest ever professor to be appointed at the College. He is also co-founder and chairman of DNA Electronics and DnaNudge and a multi-award-winning inventor whose innovations have included implantable cochlear chips for born deaf children and an artificial pancreas for diabetics.
A serial entrepreneur, his co-invention of semiconductor DNA detection revolutionised genetic testing. In recognition, for this and other inventions he received the prestigious 2014 European Inventor Award and the Royal Society Gabor Medal as well as the Faraday Medal. He has numerous IEEE awards and Medals and more recently awarded the IEEE Medal for Biomedical Engineering.
Chris is a Trustee at the Royal Institution and a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Fellow of both the IEEE and IET. He has published over 450 research papers and holds over 80 international patents in the field of semiconductors and healthcare.
Chris will discuss his newest start-up DnaNudge. DnaNudge is developing the worlds first saliva-based, retail-operated genetic ‘self-test’ and App to personalise consumers’ shopping experience. It encourages healthy choices by scanning products based upon DNA and life-style. Chris will first review the interdisciplinary biomedical setting he created at Imperial to enable such innovations, he will then discuss some of his own Microchip based medical devices and finally discuss his push towards making health personal.
What makes ‘you’ more productive, more effective, more valuable? What aspects and attributes make you ‘more’ of who you are or want to be? How do you know? Which facets of your 'self' subvert or undermine desired outcomes? Disruptively extending upon ‘quantified self' research and work in cognitive/social psychology, this talk explores and examines ‘selvesware’ as an emerging software genre enabling data-driven ‘selves-improvement.'
Ajay Bhalla is president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard and serves on the company’s global management committee. He leads the team that develops product solutions that enhance safety, security and experience for consumers, merchants, partners and governments around the world. He oversees Mastercard’s business in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Biometrics, Connected Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Digital Identity.
Ajay was previously president of Mastercard’s digital payment services business. He led the development and growth of the business in e-commerce and payments processing, establishing Mastercard as a pioneer and leader in many markets in the space. Prior to this, Ajay was president of South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Ajay is a CEME (Council on Emerging Market Enterprises) Senior Fellow at The Fletcher School, Tufts University , a Connection Science Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a supporter of the IBP through Imperial College London.
With connectivity comes opportunity but also vulnerability as criminals are innovators too. Building security by design into your innovation process can help protect your idea and your business. Sharing simple insights into the Mastercard approach as well as how we collaborate with startups Ajay Bhalla will discuss how we can all enhance and secure our innovations.