The New Normal: What to Expect After the Pandemic
UPDATE - ILP Fall 2021 conferences will be open to fully vaccinated individuals only, excepting those individuals who have a medical condition or religious exemption. Starting in early September, ILP members will use a new application developed at MIT -- Tim Tickets -- to grant campus access or scan into an event. We will provide detailed information on the application and using Tim Tickets when the application is launched. Of course, we will follow mandatory masking and social distancing indoors, per campus guidelines.
Once the disruption of the pandemic settles, successful leaders need to address pressing issues in challenging, different fronts amidst an exponentially changing world. CEOs must face unprecedented demands from the their company’s workforce, customers, Board, investors, suppliers, and regulators, and must answer the questions at hand. How will we measure and improve corporate culture? How can we can shape the technologies transforming work? What is the future of eCommerce and omnichannel strategies? How do we assign decision rights for organizational acceleration? How will organizations systematically innovate and build technology organizations? How will organizations successfully implement hybrid work environments? Join us to hear from MIT faculty and MIT Startup Exchange entrepreneurs to learn how to navigate this new era with management best practices.
REGISTRATION FEE
MIT Corporate Relations is happy to announce it will be welcoming ILP members back to campus beginning this September.
As we bring back in-person events at MIT, we want you to know that we will be taking COVID precautions to provide a safe environment for our guests. MIT requires vaccinations, weekly testing, and wearing of masks indoors for its community. We will have masks available for all conference attendees, and we will be practicing social distancing protocols. We encourage you to register at your earliest convenience as capacity will be limited.
Here are some helpful links for attending our Fall 2021 events:
Information on visiting MIT: https://www.mit.edu/visitmit/
Where to stay: https://institute-events.mit.edu/visit/where-to-stay
Please contact us with any registration questions at ocrevents@mit.edu
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.
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.
Culture strongly impacts an organization’s ability to attract, retain, and engage employees and ultimately performance outcomes including innovation, profitability, and revenue growth. Historically, however, culture has been difficult to measure. This session will present recent innovations in Natural Language Processing that help to measure culture robustly at scale.
Ben Armstrong is the executive director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, where he co-leads the Work of the Future initiative. His research examines how workers, firms, and regions adapt to technological change. His current projects include a working group on generative AI, as well as a book on American manufacturing competitiveness. His work has been published or featured in academic and popular outlets including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Sloan Management Review, Times Higher Education, the Boston Review, Daedalus, and Economic Development Quarterly. He received his PhD from MIT and formerly worked at Google Inc.
Waves of new technology have not yet led to mass unemployment. But there have been winners and losers. Economists have shown how technological change in recent decades has created more opportunities at the upper end of the labor market for college graduates while the share of middle-wage jobs has shrunk. What can be done to support ongoing innovation while also creating more opportunities to join the middle class? In this research, Ben Armstrong explores the ways engineers design technologies – and executives adopt them – can influence how those technologies affect workers. In organization-level research, he examines what differentiates technologies that benefit workers from those that do not. Drawing on examples from manufacturing and healthcare, he proposes approaches to technology design and integration that can make automation more worker-friendly.
Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies, and the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Her pioneering research into how successful teams operate has highlighted the critical importance of managing outside, as well as inside, the team’s boundary. This research directly led to the concept of X-Teams as a vehicle for driving innovation and helping organizations move from bureaucracies to more nimble forms. Ancona’s work also focuses on the concept of distributed leadership and on the development of research-based tools, practices, and teaching/coaching models that enable organizations to foster creative leadership at every level.
She is the author of the book, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press) and the related articles, “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” and “Nimble Leadership: Walking the Line Between Creativity and Chaos” (Harvard Business Review). In addition to X-Teams, her studies of team performance have also been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the MIT Sloan Management Review. Her previous book, Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing), centers on the skills and processes needed in today’s diverse and changing organization. Ancona has served as a consultant on leadership and innovation to companies such as Accenture, BI Pharmaceuticals, the International Development Bank, Li & Fung, OCP, and Takeda.
Ancona holds a BA and an MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management from Columbia University.
Organizations today are navigating an increasingly complex and volatile business landscape, and the global COVID-19 crisis further highlighted the need to innovate and act quickly. In this session, Professor Ancona, Founder of the MIT Leadership Center, will present three key points for succeeding in a world of uncertainty. Leaders must possess the skills to track an ever-shifting environment and cultivate those skills in others. They need to create flexible teams that collaborate effectively with both internal and external partners. They must inspire their organizations to solve big problems and they can’t do all this alone — they need to bring in adaptive leaders at all levels, giving them autonomy to innovate but providing guardrails to prevent chaos. During this session, she will focus on these issues and, in particular, on:
1 - discovering and communicating your unique leadership signature
2 - creating xTEAMS as a road to innovation and leadership development
3 - moving from bureaucracies to more nimble forms of leadershship
Dr. Jeremy Gregory is Executive Director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC). He has extensive experience in working with industry partners and diverse stakeholders across MIT. Through his research, Dr. Gregory studies the economic and environmental implications of engineering and system design decisions, particularly in the area of materials production and recovery systems. His research topics include product and firm environmental footprinting, manufacturing and life-cycle cost analysis, and characterization of sustainable material systems. He has applied these methods, often with industry partners, to a range of different products and industries including pavements, buildings, automobiles, electronics, consumer goods, and waste treatment and recovery.
In addition, Dr. Gregory has served as a Faculty Fellow within MIT’s Office of Sustainability since 2018. In this role, he has collaborated with administration, faculty, staff, and students across campus to conduct analyses related to strategies for lowering MIT’s environmental footprint, with a focus on scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions.
Prior to joining the MCSC, Dr. Gregory served as Executive Director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, where he worked directly with industry leaders; drew links between academia, industry, and government; helped define strategy; and coordinated research activities with external collaborators.
Previously, Dr. Gregory was the Education Coordinator for the MIT Portugal Program’s Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing Focus Area, where he built education and research activities between MIT, three Portuguese universities, and numerous Portuguese companies.
He holds a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Montana State University-Bozeman, and a master of science and PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT.
The recently formed MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) brings together an influential group of industry leaders to closely collaborate with MIT on driving priorities and strategic direction setting around sustainability, climate change mitigation, and adaptation. The MCSC provides a link between academic innovation and rapid implementation for the most promising and equitable climate and sustainability industry opportunities. Jeremy will provide an overview of MCSC activities in its first year of existence and plans for scaling sustainability solutions.
Ariadna joined MIT Startup Exchange in a new role as Events Leader in September 2019. She has responsibility for the development and execution of events featuring startups, and for helping to promote collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. She works closely with the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), also within Corporate Relations, and with other areas around the MIT innovation ecosystem and beyond. Prior to this, Ariadna worked for over a decade at Credit Suisse Group in New York City and London in a few different roles in event management and later became a Director for client strategy. She has combined her experience in the private sector with work in non-profits as a Consultant and Development Director at the New York Immigration Coalition, Immigrant Defense Project and Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Ariadna also served on the Board of the Riverside Clay Tennis Association in NY for several years. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Communications from New York University (NYU), also doing coursework at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico City, and her M.A. in Sociology from the City University of New York (CUNY).
1) Pathr: Real time insights and advanced spatial intelligence delivered across an organization’s ecosystem to positively impact business outcomes
2) Einblick: A radically faster approach to making data-driven decisions
3) Sparkdit: Human-like intelligence to elevate online traction with best recommendations
4) Covariance: Beyond external data with AI
5) iQ3Connect: Enabling remote collaboration beyond the flat screen
6) Relativity6: Fast, reliable, validated, real-time industry classifications and descriptions with artificial intelligence.
7) serviceMob: The world’s first cross-industry and ontology-driven analytics platform for customer service and support
8) TechNext: Empirical Technology Forecasting
9) Teranalytics: Developing the logistics tools of the future
Zoë Cayetano is the Head of Product at Pathr.ai™. With a deep background in data science and artificial intelligence, Cayetano drives product strategy and vision. Most recently, she was a Senior Product Manager for AI and IoT at Intel, leading product growth and strategy for Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, an AI developer software tool, and product management for the Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 and VPU-based developer kits.
Prior to Intel, Cayetano was a data science researcher for a particle accelerator lab at Arizona State University. In 2020, she was a Nominee for Venture Beat's AI Rising Star Award.
Cayetano holds B.S. degrees in Engineering Physics/Applied Physics with Honors and Marketing from Arizona State University. She is also the author of the book "Unlearn Dogma".
Tim Kraska is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-director of the Data System and AI Lab at MIT (DSAIL@CSAIL), and CEO and co-founder of Einblick Analytics. Currently, his research focuses on building systems for machine learning, and using machine learning for systems. Before joining MIT, Tim was an Assistant Professor at Brown, spent time at Google Brain, and was a PostDoc in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley after he got his PhD from ETH Zurich. Tim is a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in computer science and received several awards including the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, the university-wide Early Career Research Achievement Award at Brown University, an NSF CAREER Award, as well as several best paper and demo awards at VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE.
Fadi Micaelian, founder and CEO of Sparkdit, is an entrepreneur with a seasoned background in enterprise software. He served over the past three decades in several executive positions at industry leaders like Oracle, BroadVision, Intellectual Ventures, ViewStar (now OpenText), DataBeam (now IBM) and Element Data. Most prominently, he was the founder of Auguri Corporation where he served as its CEO for 13 years, leading it to a successful acquisition.
Fadi is also a distinguished scholar and an inventor, who has been repeatedly published, and was awarded several patents by the USPTO, in AI/ML, Cloud, Big Data, Analytics, Decision and IoT. Author of early inventions in the field of AI/ML, his patents, considered essential, rated 90-100 percentile are highly cited by Google, Microsoft, eBay, Oracle, EMC, Yahoo, GE, etc.
He is passionate about Technology, Physics and Track and Field. Fadi holds a BS of Physics, a BE of Engineering, and obtained an MS in Engineering from MIT, and an MBA from INSEAD.
Dr. Michael Fleder’s MIT research forms the basis for Covariance.ai - a machine-learning startup that enables companies to track competitors and markets with previously-impossible clarity and precision. Michael’s work has been featured in MIT News (2021, 2019) and leading modeling conferences. Michael has extensive background in robotics (MIT, NASA/JPL), quantitative trading, and technology advising for C-Suite at retail banks. Michael earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from MIT.
Ali Merchant is the co-founder and CEO of iQ3Connect. He has worked and published in the aerospace industry in the area of numerical simulation and design optimization of gas turbines. Design methods and tools he has developed are used for gas turbine design in universities and industry. He brings 15 years of experience and knowledge of CAD, CAE, and multi-disciplinary product design to the iQ3Connect team. Ali holds a Masters and Ph.D. from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jon Ringvald is CMO and Head of Product, of Relativity6, an original MIT STEX ILP company. Jon led development of Relativity6's proprietary AI-powered KYB Line of Business Detection API, as well as algorithms used globally in production at fortune 500s and top venture backed financial technology companies.
Marcel Barrera is a customer experience/operations strategist with over 20 years of experience in CRM, Contact Center, Customer Insights, and Customer Journey Optimization. Marcel spent his career leading service operation teams, and working at blue-chip consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte with Fortune 500 clients to optimize their people, process, and technologies to be more customer centric while improving gross margin. As a domain expert of all things on the post sales journey, Marcel leads the strategic growth of the business and commercial design of ontologies across all industries, helping customers truly democratize their data at scale.
Anuraag was a Fellow, MIT System Design and Management, and a part of the MIT Work of the Future Task Force. He worked for Honda R&D Japan in Tokyo at Think Lab, which helped create long term strategy for the company. After completing his undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Delhi, he joined as an automotive interior designer at the Honda R&D automobile headquarters. He also did innovation policy research, particularly innovation assessment and incubators, for the Government of India while at IITD-Department of Science & Technology Center for Policy Research.
Tomasz M. Grzegorczyk received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering (2000), and his MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016). From 2001 to 2008 he was with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed several optimization algorithms to simulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves in complex media. During this tenure he co-authored more than 100 peer reviewed papers, supervised more than 10 PhD and Master theses, and co-authored a book on the physics and application of metamaterials. He subsequently joined BAE Systems as Chief Scientist where he worked on data analysis and optimization algorithms for remote sensing applications.
Throughout his career, Tomasz used and developed algorithms to solve complex problems using large amounts of data. This led him to realize that companies often overlook or under tap the value of their data, leading to underperformance. Knowing that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offer opportunities for businesses to turn data into impactful, actionable insights that can deliver significantly improved performance, he founded Teranalytics, his third startup. Currently Teranalytics solves complex business problems with custom algorithms, delighting its customers. Prior to Teranalytics, Tomasz co-founded NutriCount, Inc., an award-winning health analytics company that helped health organizations monitor patients and drive balanced nutrition, and founded Delpsi LLC, a medical microwave imaging company. His collaboration with Dartmouth College led to the fastest 3D microwave imaging system, delivering results in under 10 minutes compared with 10 hours for competing products. Delpsi also worked with the US Government to improve detection of unexploded ordnance.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between over 1,500 MIT-connected startups and over 230 corporates that are members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP). We host a robust schedule of events and facilitate networking and introduction opportunities year round. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations. 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.
1) Sourcemap; 2) Einblick; 3) Sparkdit; 4) Covariance; 5) iQ3Connect; 6) Relativity6; 7) serviceMob; 8) TechNext; 9) Teranalytics;
10) Silverthread: Aligning software health with business performance goals (Lunch exhibit only)
Erin L. Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Erin conducts research in firms and other organizations to identify and evaluate changes in workplace policies and management practices that may improve workers’ wellbeing and advance equity while supporting strong organizational performance. Her book Overload: How Goods Jobs Went Bad and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2020, co-authored with Phyllis Moen) is based on a major experiment in a Fortune 500 firm and received the Max Weber Award from the American Sociological Association in 2021. Erin studies, teaches, and speaks on work redesign and wellbeing, the future of work, and organizational practices to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.
Professor Kelly will share her research on a work redesign approach that supports hybrid work that is beneficial to both employees and organizations. She will draw on her book Overload: How Goods Jobs Went Bad and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2020, co-authored with Phyllis Moen), which is based on a major experiment in a Fortune 500 firm. Kelly will identify research-based guiding principles for navigating the many possibilities for returning to offices in the pandemic period.
In 2020 Helena Pott was appointed as Chief Financial Officer for Evonik North America. She has 20 years global finance, supply chain and procurement experience in the chemical and automotive industry in the United States and in Germany where she held positions with increasing responsibility. Prior to joining Evonik she held positions at Robert Bosch and BASF in Germany and the US. She has earned her master’s degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Evonik is one of the world leaders in specialty chemicals. The company is active in more than 100 countries around the world and generated sales of €12.2 billion and an operating profit (adjusted EBITDA) of €1.91 billion in 2020. Evonik goes far beyond chemistry to create innovative, profitable and sustainable solutions for customers. About 33,000 employees work together for a common purpose: We want to improve life today and tomorrow.
We see responsibility and long-term business success as two sides of the same coin. Sustainability has long been a growth driver in many of our businesses. Our leading technology positions enable us to offer customers a wide range of solutions that contribute to efficient use of resources and reduce their impact on the environment.
As preconditions for Evonik’s future viability, sustainable business activities and responsible conduct are cornerstones of our business model. We drive forward our sustainability activities along the value chain in close dialogue with our stakeholders. As well as our own production processes and the products we market, we always consider the supply chain and the product benefits for our customers and their customers. We have observed rising demand for products that demonstrate a good balance of economic, ecological, and social factors. That opens up a broad spectrum of future-oriented business opportunities for Evonik in attractive markets. We want to improve life today and tomorrow.
Kenneth Koblan, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer at Sunovion, which is focused on the innovative application of science and medicine to help people with serious psychiatric, neurological and respiratory conditions. Dr. Koblan has 30 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, and has authored over 100 peer reviewed scholarly articles and holds numerous patents.
Dr. Koblan oversees a team of clinical research scientists with expertise in imaging, modeling and simulation, clinical pharmacology and bioinformatics applied to the development of new medical therapies. Sunovion is heavily invested in meeting unmet medical needs, applying innovative AI and machine learning approaches in the area of neurobiology and working in research collaborations worldwide. Dr. Koblan received his PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University and his undergraduate training (Course 7) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
About Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Sunovion)
Sunovion is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on the innovative application of science and medicine to help people with serious medical conditions. Sunovion’s vision is to lead the way to a healthier world. The company’s spirit of innovation is driven by the conviction that scientific excellence paired with meaningful advocacy and relevant education can improve lives. With patients at the center of everything it does, Sunovion has charted new paths to life-transforming treatments that reflect ongoing investments in research and development and an unwavering commitment to support people with psychiatric, neurological and respiratory conditions.
Headquartered in Marlborough, Mass., Sunovion is an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Co., Ltd. Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc., based in Mississauga, Ontario, is a wholly-owned direct subsidiary of Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. Additional information can be found on the company’s websites: www.sunovion.com and www.sunovion.ca. Connect with Sunovion on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
Michael Viazzoli is a Regional Corporate Banking Executive for HSBC. He has 30 years of global corporate and investment banking experience in businesses varying in size within complex, matrix organizations. Throughout his career, he has held various roles across the United States and in Switzerland. Prior to HSBC, he held positions at Credit Suisse, George K. Baum & Company, Bank of America and BOK Financial. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Davis and his master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
HSBC is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations with assets of nearly USD 3 trillion. Established over 150 years ago, HSBC serves companies, institutions and individuals in 64 countries and territories.
HSBC USA
HSBC Bank USA, National Association (HSBC Bank USA, N.A.) serves customers through retail banking and wealth management, commercial banking, private banking, and global banking and markets segments. It operates bank branches in: California; Washington, D.C.; Florida; Maryland; New Jersey; New York; Pennsylvania; Virginia; and Washington. HSBC Bank USA, N.A. is the principal subsidiary of HSBC USA Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC North America Holdings Inc. In the United States, deposit products are offered by HSBC Bank USA, N.A., Member FDIC, investment and brokerage services are provided through HSBC Securities (USA) Inc., (Member NYSE/FINRA/SIPC) and insurance products are provided through HSBC Insurance Agency (USA) Inc.
HSBC Holdings plc
HSBC Holdings plc, the parent company of HSBC, is headquartered in London. HSBC serves customers worldwide from offices in 64 countries and territories in its geographical regions: Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa. With assets of US$2,976bn at 30 June 2021, HSBC is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations.
David Simchi-Levi is a Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and serves as the head of the MIT Data Science Lab. He is considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics.
His Ph.D. students have accepted faculty positions in leading academic institutes including U. of California Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon U., Columbia U., Duke U., Georgia Tech, Harvard U., U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U. of Michigan, Purdue U. and Virginia Tech.
Professor Simchi-Levi is the current Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship journals of INFORMS. He served as the Editor-in-Chief for Operations Research (2006-2012), the other flagship journal of INFORMS and for Naval Research Logistics (2003-2005).
In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Impact Prize for playing a leading role in developing and disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in global supply chains.
He is an INFORMS Fellow and MSOM Distinguished Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 INFORMS Koopman Award given to an outstanding publication in military operations research; Ford Motor Company 2015 Engineering Excellence Award; 2014 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice; 2014 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award; and 2009 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize.
He was the founder of LogicTools which provided software solutions and professional services for supply chain optimization. LogicTools became part of IBM in 2009. In 2012 he co-founded OPS Rules, an operations analytics consulting company. The company became part of Accenture in 2016. In 2014, he co-founded Opalytics, a cloud analytics platform company focusing on operations and supply chain decisions. The company became part of the Accenture Applied Intelligence in 2018.
In 2020, Professor Simchi-Levi developed a practical supply chain digitization strategy that includes three important components: a unified, single, view of demand; supply chain segmentation; and smart planning and execution, all of which are powered by Digitization, Analytics and Automation. This strategy was implemented in a variety of industries including fashion retail, Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers and high-tech.
Dr. Nick van der Meulen is a Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR). He conducts academic research that targets the challenges of senior level executives at MIT CISR's member companies, with a specific interest in how companies need to organize themselves differently in the face of continuous technological change. His work on digital workplaces and the employee experience resulted in a range of academic and industry publications, in outlets such as the Journal of Information Technology, MIS Quarterly Executive, and the European Business Review. Currently, he examines how organizations are developing a skilled workforce with the decision rights to rapidly adapt to changes in both innovative and cost-effective ways.
Nick earned his PhD in Business and Management from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Prior to joining MIT CISR, he was a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam.
For many companies, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization and digital transformation efforts. Empowered teams typically led the way forward, rapidly sensing and responding to changes in their environment. In this talk Nick will present MIT CISR research on how companies can sustain this momentum, with guardrails that support an environment of empowered decision-making.
John Williams holds a BA in Physics from Oxford University, a MS in Physics from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Numerical Methods from University of Wales, Swansea. His research focuses on the application of large-scale computation to problems in cyber-physical security and energy. He is director of MIT’s Geospatial Data Center and from 2006-2012, was Director of the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory, where the Internet of Things was invented. He is author or co-author of over 250 journal and conference papers, as well as the books on Rock Mechanics and RFID Technology. He contributed to the 2013 report for the UK Office for Science Foresight Project- The Future of Manufacturing. Alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, he was named as one of the 50 most powerful people in Computer Networks. He consults to companies including Accenture, Schlumberger, Shell, Total, Exxon, SAP Research, Microsoft Research, Kajima Corp, US Lincoln Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Motorola, Phillip-Morris Inc., Ford Motor Company, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total, and ARAMCO. His international collaborations include Oxford and Cambridge Universities, HKUST, KACST, Alfaisal University, PolyU Hong Kong, Imperial College of Science and Technology UK, Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST), and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology Abu Dhabi. He organized the first Cyber-Physical Security Conference in the UK (2011), and along with Dr. Sanchez, he runs the MIT Applied Cyber Security Professional Education summer course. At MIT, he teaches courses Architecting Software Systems (MIT 1.125) and Engineering Computation and Data Science (MIT 1.00/1.001). .
In data engineering and data science, early work included simulation of Ford's global network, and analysis of SAP smart grid billing system. For Altria, he analyzed the performance of item level tagging and also their implementation of an anti-counterfeiting system using the Electronic Product Code (EPC)
In password security, Dr. Williams was a PI that developed the algorithms for a negative password authentication system for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency.
Dr. Williams advises companies in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Dr. Williams affiliations include:
Dr. Abel Sanchez holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Executive Director of MIT's Geospatial Data Center, architect of "The Internet of Things" global network, and architect of data analytics platforms for SAP, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Altria. In cyber security, Dr. Sanchez architected impact analysis of large-scale cyber attacks designing Cyber Ranges for the Department of Defense (DOD). In password security, Dr. Sanchez led the design of a password firewall (negative authentication) for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency. In machine learning, addressing fraud detection, Dr. Sanchez designed a situational awareness framework that exploits different perspectives of the same data and assigns risk scores to entities for Accenture. He led the design of a global data infrastructure simulator, modeling follow-the-sun engineering, to evaluate the impact of competing architectures on the performance, availability and reliability of the system for Ford Motor Company. He has been involved in developing E-Educational software for Microsoft via their I- Campus Program and with establishing the Accenture Technology Academy, an online resource for over 200,000 employees. He has 10 years of experience with learning management systems and has made deployments in America, Asia, and Europe. He teaches MIT courses on cybersecurity, engineering computation, and data science and has produced over 150 educational videos.
In this talk we will address the six stages of data pipeline maturity. Most companies today are between stage zero and one, with some batch query ability that is unreliable and probably takes too long. The best companies like AirBnB and Google have near real-time abilities to leverage data. We’ll talk about the different kinds of data stores, data lakes, data warehouses, data brokers with names such as Iceberg, Glacier, Snowflake, Cosmos, BigQuery, Synapse, Redshift, Firebase. We’ll look at data at rest and streaming data on the move, data in your systems, data in the Cloud and data that you’ve backed-up for that rainy-day when hackers encrypt everything. What functionality do we need and what products should we bet on. As Jeff Lawson, the CEO of $65 billion Twilio said, “Ask your developers why you need us”. Today that question applies to many more products like Confluent’s Kafka, Debezium, AIrFlow, Cassandra etc. Most companies think they need data scientists who know machine learning without realizing that without, fast and stable data pipelines these will be “luxury employees”. We’ll talk about the relatively unknown but critical field of data engineering and why you might want to hire them.
Luis Perez-Breva, PhD (http://linkedin.com/in/lpbreva) is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator and the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto (The MIT Press, 2017). He is an expert in technology innovation, venture labs, taking deep tech to impact, and applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems. He has enjoyed success with inventions and new companies in security, telecom, fintech, and genetics to name some. Chiefly among them is the AI-based system to locate 911 calls in case of emergency deployed worldwide. His work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC, Wharton Business Radio, Entrepreneur, Zdnet, Quartz, Epsilon Theory and several other national and international media.
Currently, Luis is the Faculty Director of Innovation Teams (iTeams http://iteams.mit.edu), MIT’s flagship joint enterprise between MIT Engineering and MIT Sloan to put the Institute’s deep tech advances to work to solve real-world problems. Through iTeams, he has helped nearly 200 MIT technologies find a path to impact leading to the formation of some 40 new, enduring deep tech companies across all industries from mining to telecommunications.
Luis has worked with venture capital and numerous corporations and adapted his work to develop innovating factories. Currently, Luis is developing a technology repurposing fund to rescue, recycle, and, in essence, turn around technologies analogous to how private equity seeks to turn around companies.
Dr. Perez-Breva holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT and degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and business from leading universities in Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the United States (MIT). In 2011, the Spanish government recognized his career achievements by awarding him the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain.
Contrary to popular belief, building a robust technology organization doesn’t hinge on having a good (exponential?) idea but on surviving all your bad ones – systematically.
Most would rally behind the belief that technology ought to change the world for the better— solve problems that matter! Innovation!. That is all fine and well except that the last two decades of innovation methods don’t explain how to do any of that. And yet, using technology to level the playing field, doing good and doing well, and learning to invent and innovate with what you have are the kind of superpowers many hope for when the word innovation is invoked.
I’ve spent the last two decades wrestling with the question of how to do innovation, not just how it happens, or how it threatens what you do, but what it means and how do you do it. Along this time I’ve shepherded over 200 technologies from MIT (Deep tech!) to impact; educated thousands at MIT and worldwide across all disciplines from policy to business and engineering on how to innovate; helped translate research into societal meaning; built factories of innovation in industry and venture capital where we systematically invent and create new organizations; and have built technology companies myself using artificial intelligence to derive new uses from existing large scale infrastructures.
I’d very much like to engage you in a conversation about what about innovation, if anything, may be useful to you as we start the post-pandemic reconstruction—we’ve had enough disruption already. I’ll draw from my experience at MIT and building innovation factories to discuss how to innovate efficiently with technology; that is, how to conceive diversified technology organizations, how to meaningfully de-risk them, and what it takes to scale up a robust organization. To make the conversation lively, I’d like to ask you to entertain three ideas that I believe should be straightforward but that the way we went about innovation before the pandemic has made look contrarian:
Join us for a conversation about what it takes to conceive, invent, design, plan, de-risk and ultimately build organizations that use technology as a tool to solve problems that matter sustainably. That is doing well and doing good.
Dr. Eva Ponce is the Director of the research area on Omnichannel Distribution Strategies at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, as Research Scientist. Her current research focus is the design of omnichannel distribution strategies that integrates online and offline channels. Her main focus is to help retailers, and manufacturers to understand how e-commerce growth and mobile devices are affecting and transforming their supply chains. She also leads research initiatives on Circular Supply Chains, Reverse Logistics and Closed-Loop Supply Chains.
Dr. Ponce is the Executive Director of the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management. She leads the MicroMasters in SCM team and oversees the five-massive online MITx courses in Supply Chain Management (CTL.SCx courses) plus the Comprehensive Final Exam (CTL.CFx) that make up the MicroMasters Program. The courses are attended by tens of thousands of students in open enrollment from more than 190 countries.
Currently, Dr. Ponce is leading an innovative research line in Omnichannel Education at MIT, which is transforming supply chain management education around the world. Dr. Ponce and her team received in 2018 the Irwin Sizer Award for the 'Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education'. Dr. Ponce has over nineteen years of experience in teaching and research in supply chain management and quantitative models for industrial engineering. She teaches courses in Sustainable Supply Chains, Digital Supply Chains and Supply Chain Management at Master, PhD and Executive Education level. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Management Program at Harvard Extension School. In 2008, she received her tenure as an Associate Professor in Supply Chain Management and Logistics at the School of Industrial Engineering of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM).
Dr. Ponce received her PhD in Industrial Engineering from Carlos III University of Madrid in 2002. Her dissertation received two awards with special distinction. In 2000, she was granted with a pre-doctoral research stay in the Hass School of Business, University of California, and in 2011, she was a visiting professor at MIT CTL. She joined MIT CTL in 2016. She has an active publication record, including journal papers, conference proceedings and refereed abstracts.
The rapid growth of mobile technology and e-commerce has dramatically changed retail behaviors and the needs of the supply chains that support these behaviors. Almost 70% of all shopping events start online with customers exploring options in their personal devices. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated even more this trend. In this stalk we will identify the main challenges in omnichannel and how the growth of ecommerce is transforming the supply chains.
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.
In this talk, I will describe why and how to move from bad jobs and the down-spiraling mediocrity they cause to good jobs and the continually improving excellence they enable. At a time when more than 45 million Americans—many of whom were called essential workers during the pandemic—earn below subsistence wages, 70% Americans believe that the economic system is rigged against them, and concerns about social injustice are on the rise, creating good jobs with living wages, meaning and dignity is more important than ever.