To be a successful leader in today’s global landscape, CEOs must foster disruptive innovation, embrace a multi-generational workforce, and tackle the daunting process of digitization. How can you implement organizational changes that meet the needs of employees with diverse skillsets and values? How can leadership best nurture disruptive innovation so your organization succeeds? Join MIT faculty to learn management best practices and how to navigate the pitfalls on the road to success.
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.
Sanjay Sarma is the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is the first Dean of Digital Learning at MIT. He co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT and developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. He was also the the founder and CTO of OATSystems, which was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) in 2008. He serves on the boards of GS1, EPCglobal and several startup companies including Senaya and ESSESS.
Dr. Sarma received his Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Sarma also worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, California. He has authored over 75 academic papers in computational geometry, sensing, RFID, automation and CAD, and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research including the MacVicar Fellowship, the Business Week eBiz Award and Informationweek's Innovators and Influencers Award. He advises several national governments and global companies.
Companies are struggling to keep up with game-changing approaches that are threatening their traditional businesses. The concept of products is under threat. Technologies such as IoT and business trends such as the sharing economy are creating a new design language for crafting solutions to customer needs. For example, Ford might think it is competing with Toyota, but it may actually be competing with Uber or an electric scooter company. Uber is essentially a new offering that leverages the sensors and connectivity of smart phones, the cloud, and gig economy and changing consumer patterns to supplant a product traditionally sold to individuals — the car. We call this Inversion. This talk will address how to think about this new world and compete in it.
Yossi Sheffi is an expert in systems optimization, risk analysis and supply chain management. He is author of a text book and seven award-winning management books. His latest books are: “The New Abnormal: Reshaping Business and Supply Chain Strategy Beyond Covid-19,” (October 1, 2020) and “A Shot in the Arm: How Science, Technology and Supply Chains Converged to Vaccinate the World (October 2021).
Under his leadership, MIT CTL has launched many educational, research, and industry/government outreach programs, including the MIT SCALE network involving six academic centers round the world. In 2015, CTL has launched the on-line Micromaster’s program, enrolling over 480,000 students in 196 countries.
Outside the institute, Dr. Sheffi has consulted with numerous organizations. He has also founded or co-founded five successful companies, all acquired later by large enterprises.
Dr. Sheffi has been recognized in numerous ways in academic and industry forums and won dozens of awards.
He obtained his B.Sc from the Technion in Israel in 1975, and SM and Ph.D. from MIT in 1978.
For more information visit: http://sheffi.mit.edu/
Professor Sheffi explains why companies are not, in general, making the deep investments in sustainability that are required in order to “move the needle” and why they should not do it. He addresses why consumers are not willing to pay more or sacrifice in the name of environmental sustainability, despite saying so in surveys, and why such behavior may be rational. He also explains how governments contribute to the problem. Professor Sheffi will end with some thoughts and insights about future directions. The presentation and discussion include many examples, and time will be allocated for Q&A and discussion with Professor Sheffi.
Executive Director MIT Professional Education
Bhaskar Pant is the Executive Director of MIT Professional Education, the arm of MIT that provides technical professionals a gateway to MIT expertise via education courses and programs designed for them. More than 1,500 professionals from over sixty countries arrive on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every summer to attend courses of a diverse set of technical disciplines. In addition, over 10,000 professionals worldwide are now attending MIT’s online professional courses that include topics such as Big Data. MIT Professional Education is also offering select MIT courses in locations in Asia, Latin America, and Europe
Prior to joining MIT, Mr. Pant held several leadership positions such as serving as Managing Director, Asia Pacific, for the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s foremost academic testing organization headquartered in Princeton, N.J. As managing director, he was responsible for overseeing the company’s English language testing operations throughout Asia. This included the opening of a subsidiary in China that administered the TOEIC English proficiency test for engineers and other working professionals in the nation.
Previously, Mr. Pant led the global corporate training arm of the World Learning Graduate Institute in Vermont and held senior management positions at media and media technology companies such as Sony Corporation and Turner Broadcasting/CNN. Mr. Pant was the first President of Turner Broadcasting’s subsidiary in India.
Mr. Pant holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester and a graduate degree in communications and management from Indiana University in Bloomington. Besides managing MIT Professional Education, Mr. Pant teaches intercultural communication to engineering students at MIT and management students at the Harvard University Extension School.
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.
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.
Shimir Varia is the Global Vice President of Enterprise Architecture for Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s leading brewer. At AB InBev, Enterprise Architecture includes the areas of data, cloud, network, workplace, mobile, applications and API’s/microservices. Varia has held this position since January 2017.
Varia joined AB InBev in 1999 as a systems technology engineer at the Columbus Brewery in Ohio. Since then, he has held various positions in both the brewery operations and IT functions and has worked in Ohio, St.Louis, New Jersey, and New York.
His main focus is driving the digital transformation for AB InBev. Varia and his team designed and built AB InBev’s cloud, bringing together the entire company’s data to provide a base for analytics and reporting and connect all employees through a collaboration platform.
Varia holds a degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Pennsylvania State University.
Companies are racing to implement AI to better their businesses; however, most have yet to see results. While your company might have the magic algorithm, there’s a good chance it does not have quality data to yet gain insights. The data most organizations currently have was not gathered or created with machine learning in mind; rather, it was traditionally used for measuring physical and financial assets. But how could these same measures apply in a marketplace where the majority of assets are now intangible? In order for your data (and insights) to have meaning, it must be curated around key knowledge and differentiated from your competitors’ data. When making important decisions, what matters most to your company? How can you capture this knowledge and data to make the best use of it?
Jana Eggers is CEO of the neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence platform company, Nara Logics. Eggers is an experienced tech exec focused on inspiring teams to build great products. Eggers has started and grown companies and led large organizations at public companies. She is active in customer-inspired innovation, the artificial intelligence industry, the Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose-style leadership, as well as running and triathlons. Eggers has held technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbaud, Los Alamos National Laboratory (computational chemistry and super computing), Basis Technology (internationalization technology), Lycos, American Airlines, Spreadshirt (ecomm), and multiple startups.
Arundo Founder and CEO Tor Jakob Ramsøy was previously a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm. At McKinsey, he led the technology service lines for the Global Energy Practice and EMEA Big Data/Advanced Analytics, and was also country manager for McKinsey Norway and led the Business Technology Office in Scandinavia. Prior to McKinsey, Ramsøy was a Senior Partner at Accenture. He holds an MS from MIT.
Arundo is a software company based in Oslo, Norway; Houston, TX; and Palo Alto, CA. Their products help business leaders and operations professionals in maritime and other heavy industries better manage complex physical systems through machine learning and data-driven software applications. Founded in 2015, Arundo has raised over $35 million in financing and currently consists of around 100 software engineers, data scientists, and industrial domain experts, including 23 PhDs. They are part of Stanford’s StartX program and have received investment from the Stanford-StartX Fund. Arundo was also named to the MIT STEX25 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Startup Exchange.
Harrison Bralower is cofounder and CEO of Abstract Manufacturing (MassChallenge 2018), which helps legacy manufacturing operations discover the hidden factory with non-invasive sensor retrofits and computer vision. He has led development of complex hardware systems in all physical engineering fields, including astronomical camera systems in the MIT Space Systems Lab. Bralower served as entrepreneur-in-residence in 2018 at The Engine, the MIT-backed venture capital firm.
Mike Perozek heads up Smartvid.io's sales, marketing, partner, and customer success programs. He is passionate about helping customers adopt new technology and achieve breakthrough financial and operational improvements. Prior to Smartvid.io, Perozek built and led sales and customer success teams at leading vertical SaaS companies Buildium LLC (real estate) and Bullhorn (recruiting/CRM). Perozek's alma maters include Stanford University and MIT Sloan, and when he's not working, he's hanging out with his family and spending time outdoors.
John Wass is CEO of Profit Isle. He is the former Senior Vice President of Staples and CEO of WaveMark, an RFID company recently acquired by Cardinal Health. Wass was also a key senior executive during Staples growth from three stores to over 1,000 nationwide. He is a graduate of Princeton and MIT.
Harish Batlapenumarthy is founder and CEO of Emtropy Labs. For over 15 years, Batlapenumarthy, an MIT Sloan and IIT Bombay grad, has helped build and deploy enterprise grade applications for complex business processes from finance to HR to supply chain. He led the M&A technology integrations at Greatbatch Inc and was a product manager at Oracle Corp before that. Before Emtropy, he worked on Meemoz which used AI to automate the day in the life of a manager.
Passion and drive to solve the inefficiencies in the networking, referral and executive recruitment process comes from facing the problems of networking and experiencing the struggle of finding the right Alumni to approach for referrals. Neerja Bharti has 15+ years of experience in consulting & technology development. Bharti holds an EMBA from MIT Sloan and a masters in computer science. She founded GeniusMesh to make it easier for EMBAs to find each other, share confidential opportunities, and help companies fill high profile roles, faster.
DeepBench.io was founded by four MIT graduate students in 2017. Since then, DeepBench has evolved from a "faster & cheaper" expert network, to become the SaaS infrastructure that makes external and internal expertise accessible within an organization. Strategy consultants, investors, designers and innovators use the DeepBench platform to access external expertise, organize expertise internally, and make thought leaders easily accessible for 1-1 consultations with clients.
Before DeepBench, Devin Basinger (MIT Sloan MBA 2018) consulted high tech clients at Accenture.
Subhrangshu Datta is CEO of CompanionMx. He has built and scaled several innovation driven start-up business units with large medical device companies and served as Global Head of Sales & Marketing for Smith & Nephew’s <$100M Gynecology business and also previously as General Manager for Sushrut-Adler, a wholly owned Smith & Nephew Subsidiary in the Emerging Markets. Datta served as the Head of the Fertility Technologies business at EMD Serono and Operations Strategy Consulting Manager at A.T. Kearney. He was a Leaders for Global Operations Fellow at MIT and holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, an SM in engineering systems from MIT, an MS in materials science & engineering from Ohio State University, and a B.Eng. in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.
Ali Merchant is the cofounder and CEO of iQ3Connect. He has more than 10 years of experience with the computational methods and application of design methodologies in the aerospace industry. Merchant has worked with major US engine manufacturers, NASA, and DoD on advanced research projects. He holds a Masters and PhD from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.
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.
Startup Lightning Talks Part I: Data to AI - Forge.AI: Unstructured text to structured data for machine learning - Nara Logics: AI for personalization and decision support - Arundo: Edge data ingest to machine learning for smarter operations - Abstract Manufacturing: Discover hidden factory with retrofit sensors & video - Smartvid.io: Reduce project risk on construction jobsites with AI
Startup Lightning Talks Part II: Intelligent Management - Profit Isle: Analytics & management process for accelerating profits - Emtropy Labs: AI-powered feedback management - GeniusMesh: AI-powered platform for executive recruitment & networking - DeepBench: Technology platform for expertise on demand - CompanionMX: Proactive mobile monitoring of behavior health - iQ3Connect: Web-based virtual reality platform for collaboration
Exhibiting startups include: Forge.ai | Nara Logics | Arundo | Abstract | Smartvid.io | Profit Isle | Emtropy Labs | GeniusMesh | DeepBench | CompanionMX | iQ3Connect
Ongoing performance improvement is essential to sustainable enterprise success. Serious organizations seek increasing returns on their financial, human, and intellectual capital. The concurrent rise of ‘Big Data’ and ‘Machine Learning’ fundamentally changes how leaderships can measure and manage customer value creation.
So how do you want to hold yourself, your key people, key processes, and customers accountable for the future? What do accountability and key performance operationally mean in an era where algorithms are smarter than you are? Increasingly, ML-driven KPIs will lead, guide, and oversee strategic outcomes. Today’s ‘balanced scorecards’ are giving way to 'digital dashboards' that anticipate and predict opportunities, not just synthesize and summarize results. The interplay of Data Governance, Decision Rights, and Predictive KPIs will increasingly determine how organizations deliver profitable growth.
Sheri Brodeur is a Director of Corporate Relations at MIT. Prior to this, she spent 22 years at Hewlett-Packard Company in several roles. Her most recent position was in the HP Labs Strategy and Innovation Office. The role of this organization is to set HP Labs' research strategy and extend HP's internal research capacity by partnering with universities, governments, and other companies on a global scale to rapidly advance the positive impact of technology on the world.
Sheri spent 15 years with HP Labs, HP's corporate researcher center, managing major university alliances and programs, including a $25M program with MIT. She has been responsible for managing global higher education technology programs in the areas of Security, Digital Libraries (DSpace), Information Management, and Sustainability.
Prior to this role she spent the previous eight years at Hewlett-Packard in the sales organization moving from the position of Field Sales Engineer to Global Account Manager. In this role she was responsible for selling, supporting and delivering high end test and measurement solutions for the communications industry.
Brodeur has a BS in Ceramic Engineering from Alfred University and an MS in Solid State Science from the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State University.
Andrew Backs is the founder of Pilot44, a passionate group of accomplished startup entrepreneurs, technologists, and marketers that utilize new lean methodologies to help large companies accelerate digital innovation and build new ventures. Pilot44 helps prototype, pilot, and validate startup-powered solutions that transform companies, solve business challenges, disrupt categories, and even lead to entirely new businesses. Prior to founding Pilot44, Backs led Procter & Gamble’s open innovation effort in Silicon Valley. He is an experienced corporate entrepreneur that spent 10 years at P&G and has marketing, retail, finance, M&A, and extensive business development experience. Backs has a unique talent for bridging an entrepreneurial approach with the complexities of large company operations, cutting through the noise to bring meaningful solutions to market.
Damon Frost is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for P&G’s Beauty business. Frost is responsible for Beauty’s category’s IT needs end to end, including innovation, productivity opportunities, and the development of a category-specific digital strategy. He was previously responsible for the development and operations of all sales systems, marketing and brand systems, initiative management, and business intelligence systems for the company. During his tenure at P&G, Frost has had many roles including being on the core team of globalizing P&G email environment, driving the architecture choice for P&G EAI platforms, leading the development of P&G next generation business intelligence tools and roles in P&G’s business units leading the IT strategy for the Coffee business, running P&G’s email, instant messaging, audio and web conferencing, and video collaboration services globally and P&G India CIO. He currently serves on the Cincinnati – Hamilton County Community Action Agency Board of Trustees, Ohio State University, Max M. Fisher College of Business Alumni Board, and was on the American School of Bombay’s Board of Trustees (President). Frost currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife Karyn and two daughters.
Charlie Purtell is a founding member of the Danaher Life Sciences Innovation Center, which is making direct, strategic equity investments in early stage life science companies. Prior to his role in the Innovation Center, Purtell headed up business development and strategy at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences and was a Director of Strategic Development (M&A) at Danaher. In addition to supporting M&A transactions, he has helped create standard work around Danaher’s open innovation efforts. Prior to Danaher, Purtell had a variety of product development, business management, and business development roles in leading biotech companies – Life Technologies/ Applied Biosystems; ARIAD Pharmaceuticals; Incyte; Genencor International (now Dow Dupont), and Praxis Biologics (now Pfizer). His experience spans across industrial biotech, biopharma, diagnostics, and life science tools companies. He received his MBA from the University of Rochester, where he also spent two years doing graduate studies in microbiology & immunology; and a BS in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, where he also worked as a lab tech prior to graduate school.
Hear from panelists from both large corporations and startups to discuss the challenges and successes of engaging with the other and working together. Now more than ever, collaborative innovation is essential for growth and combating (or leading) market disruption. Startups allow large companies to develop and test new technologies with less risk and overhead; meanwhile, corporations offer advantages of a large network, greater resources, brand recognition, and market knowledge and experience for startups. Collaborating should be a win-win scenario; however, best practices and approach may not always be obvious (or easy) when crossing lines.
Eric Bergemann is Senior Director of Executive Programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he oversees a portfolio of non-degree executive programs. He has worked with firms in the fields of energy, pharmaceuticals/life science, mobility, high technology, banking/finance, and consumer products. Bergemann is active in business development, and is the Executive Education capability development leader in Program & Instructional Design Methodology and Improvement. In 2009, he received the MIT Sloan Appreciation Team Award.
Director, MIT FutureTech Research Project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) Principal Investigator, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy
Neil Thompson is the Director of the FutureTech research project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and a Principal Investigator at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he co-directed the Experimental Innovation Lab (X-Lab), and a Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. He has advised businesses and government on the future of Moore’s Law, has been on National Academies panels on transformational technologies and scientific reliability, and is part of the Council on Competitiveness’ National Commission on Innovation & Competitiveness Frontiers.
He has a PhD in Business and Public Policy from Berkeley, where he also did Masters degrees in Computer Science and Statistics. He also has a masters in Economics from the London School of Economics, and undergraduate degrees in Physics and International Development. Prior to academia, He worked at organizations such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bain and Company, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Canadian Parliament.
How do large corporations source their most important innovations? Whether internal through e.g. central R&D or innovation labs, or external through e.g. universities or startups? We interviewed/surveyed more than 350 firms from around the world, and their answers are surprising. For example, Open Innovation, particularly the flashier types, are actually used by fewer companies than one might assume. However, in the past five years there’s greater momentum to seek out and practice Open Innovation, particularly for digital innovations. Even more interesting, we can see which sources are producing the most important innovations for companies, and whether those innovations convert to long-term competitive advantage. What lessons might you draw on innovation for your company?
Bruce Cameron is the Director of the System Architecture Group at MIT. His research interests include technology strategy, system architecture, and the management of product platforms. Previously, Dr. Cameron ran the MIT Commonality study, a 30-firm investigation of platforming returns, which concluded that firms face systemic downward pressure on commonality, partially resulting from challenges capturing the costs of variety. Dr. Cameron has supervised over 50 graduate students and has directed research projects for Amazon, BP, Sikorsky, Nokia, Caterpillar, AMGEN, Verizon, and NASA. Current research efforts include:
Dr. Cameron is a co-founder of Technology Strategy Partners, a consultancy created to help firms to restructure product development organizations, build systems engineering functions, and identify new architectures. Dr. Cameron has led projects in Fortune 500 firms in high tech, medical devices, transportation, and consumer goods.
Chief Technology Officers represent an increasingly valuable role in the C-suite, given recent technology-sector IPO frequency and valuations. However, CTOs are an amorphous group : they range from product developers (e.g. Bobby Murphy of Snap) to R&D portfolio managers (e.g. Dr. Greg Hyslop of Boeing) to technology evangelists (e.g. Werner Vogels of Amazon). Some CTOs deliver enormous value for their companies based on their decision-making and their presence, while others fade into the background noise of corporate overhead. In the face of long-term technology trends, how will you know if your CTO is contributing to the value of the firm? We will summarize the initial findings MIT CTO Study, an ongoing project to characterize the role and performance of CTOs.
Fred Goff is a leading voice in Worker advocacy and in bringing balance back to capitalism. Fred is the founder and CEO of Jobcase – a social platform that empowers over 100 million Americans as they manage their own future of work. Jobcase is a leader in “people-first tech-strategy” which includes democratizing the benefits of big data, machine learning and blockchain for the benefit of America’s workforce. Fred Goff holds a BS in Economics as well as an M.S. in Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School and also earned an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT. Prior to switching his career to worker advocacy and tech, Fred enjoyed success as both a proprietary trader and machine-learning based hedge fund manager.
Jobcase, an MIT CSAIL-affiliated startup, empowers 100 million of the US working class. Applying data analysis and optimized outreach, they connect workers to jobs in trucking, warehouse, customer care, and more. The average worker today holds much anxiety surrounding economic conditions and technological changes, e.g. AI and automation. They need more than just job opportunities, and now seek knowledge and advice from an online community of like-minded workers in our increasing gig economy to succeed. Blue- and pink-collar workers often do not know how to address their concerns within the workplace or how to transition into different positions without having to start from the bottom again. Having tools that can reach workers from the top-down and that allow them to connect with each other is essential to empowering the worker and ultimately fuel an ambitious future workforce.
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.
Online shopping has given rise to a wealth of data previously unavailable to retailers. This data has created new opportunities for companies to personalize their services to individual customers, such as through targeted promotions and personalized assortments and pricing. As a side benefit, knowledge of individual customer behavior can also help improve sales forecasting. But in order to develop consumer-targeted strategies, we first need a demand forecasting model that captures “trends” between customers (or groups of customers). Using customers’ purchase information, we have developed a machine learning algorithm that incorporates potential trends between groups of customers based on their transaction history. Unlike previous models, this model can even estimate customer demand with transaction data alone. This personalized forecasting also allows us to optimize targeted promotions to improve profits.
How some organizations generate value faster than others, with rewards for all stakeholders, is the focal question for Steve Spear (DBA MS MS), senior lecturer at MIT, author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. Winners create new knowledge and skills faster—ideally, everyone discovering something new always. These ideas have been expounded across Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine and Academic Medicine, School Administrator, and Proceeding of the US Naval Institute. Proofs in practice include Pratt and Whitney’s winning the F-35 engine contract, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Systems “Perfecting Patient Care System,” standing up the Alcoa Business System, and development/promotion of the Navy’s High Velocity Learning initiative.
Knowing how to manage complex undertakings—invention of new science, development of new products, stand up of new systems, operation of sprawling operations—such that new knowledge and skills are developed at incredible speed is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. But how does this advantage translate? We undertake projects, programs, and the like because there is a problem for which no solution exists. It has to be invented, and the faster and easier we discover our way to the right answers, the better for all of our stakeholders. Do that repeatedly and consistently, and competitors cannot keep up. Existing opportunities to build knowledge and skills will be identified during planning, practice, and performance with examples from drug development, software design, social services, and military applications.
Professor, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Dr. Donald Sull is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he directs the Measuring Culture and Strategic Agility projects and teaches courses on competitive strategy and strategy execution. Sull was formerly a Professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School and received his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees from Harvard University.
Sull has published six books and over 100 cases and articles, including a dozen best-selling Harvard Business Review articles and MIT Sloan Management Review's most popular strategy article of all time. 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 advised top teams and boards 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) and the Sultan of Oman. Prior to academia, he worked as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company and as a management investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.
Sull is the co-founder and CEO of CultureX, which leverages proprietary AI to measure and improve corporate culture, and an advisor to several start-ups, including Betterworks, Tomorrow.io, and eToro.
A recent survey of more than 400 global CEOs revealed that excellence in execution was the number one challenge facing corporate leaders, ahead of issues including innovation, geopolitical instability, and top-line growth. These executives are right to worry about execution. Most companies struggle to translate their strategy into results. Between one-half and two-thirds of companies fall short when it comes to achieving their strategic priorities. This session will provide evidence on key obstacles to strategy execution, and practical tips for how to translate strategy into results.
Director MIT AgeLab
Joseph Coughlin, PhD is Director of the MIT AgeLab. Based in the Center for Transportation & Logistics, he teaches in MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the Sloan School's Advanced Management Program. Coughlin conducts research on the impact of global demographic change and technology trends on consumer behavior and business strategy. He advises a wide variety of global firms in financial services, healthcare, leisure and travel, luxury goods, real estate, retail, technology, and transportation. Coughlin has served on advisory boards for firms such as Bell Canada, British Telecom, Daimler, Fidelity Investments and Sanofi-Aventis. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to the White House Advisory Committee on Aging and by Governor Charlie Baker to the Governor’s Council on Aging in Massachusetts, where he co-chaired the Innovation & Technology Subcommittee. A Behavioral Sciences Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a Fellow of Switzerland’s World Demographics & Ageing Forum, Coughlin is a Senior Contributor to Forbes and writes regularly for MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal. He was named by Fast Company Magazine as one the ‘100 Most Creative in Business’ and by the Wall Street Journal as inventing the future of retirement. Recently, Coughlin was recognized as one of 15 World Minds by the Zurich-based World Minds, a select community of global leaders in science, arts and business. His new book, The Longevity Economy: Inside the World's Fastest Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (Public Affairs, 2017), is one of CEO READ’s Business Bestsellers.
The key to driving innovation lies in inspiring and motivating your workforce. But how does this apply to today as employers must engage an entire lifespan of workers? Each generation holds their own language, expectations, and life challenges, and addressing these individually is expensive and offers no guarantee of success. Instead, we should consider what these groups have in common. This talk introduces us to the greater “Gen S” – that is, Generation Stressed – whose most in-demand commodity is attention. Employees are constantly juggling an ever-increasing volume, velocity, and complexity of issues that vie for their attention and engagement, and employers must actively compete to both gain and sustain their attention. Drawing upon research in psychology, marketing, and cognitive engineering, this talk will describe the dynamics of Gen S and how employers can attain agenda status for employees across the lifespan.