The digital future is here, and the threat of disruption looms large. In a rapidly expanding digital marketplace, legacy companies without a clear digital transformation strategy are being left behind. COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the transition to a digital future. To succeed companies must embark on the difficult path of digital transformation…and that doesn’t mean creating another app. But what does digital transformation mean for your company and your business? How can we stay on the top of these rapid changes? What challenges have many high-profile companies faced? How can you prepare to succeed in a changing digital climate?
Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program for this webinar series to discuss the successes—and failures—of digital transformation from taking the right approach to squeezing the most value out of your data to embracing and maintaining the transformation.
Program Director, MIT Startup Exchange
Dr. Rebecca Xiong joined Corporate Relations as Program Director, Startup Exchange in October 2018.
Dr. Xiong comes to Corporate Relations with more than 15 years of experience in the MIT Startup Ecosystem, having co-founded and worked at multiple MIT startups. Most recently, as Co-founder and Chief Scientist at SocMetrics, she leads product management, data science, and machine learning for SocMetric’s personalization and marketing campaign products. Before SocMetrics, Xiong co-founded Going.com. Going.com connected people via local events to enhance their offline social life, and through Rebecca’s leadership grew to 1M members, tens of millions of monthly pageviews, and finally its acquisition by AOL. Before these two entrepreneurial endeavors, Xiong held positions as Product Marketing Manager (DataPower, acquired by IBM), Senior Program Manager (Performaworks, acquired by Workscape), and Team Lead (Akamai Technologies). She also has research experience at Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Dr. Xiong earned her B.S. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Media Lab at MIT with her thesis “Visualizing Information Spaces to Enhance Social Interaction." She was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship Recipient. She holds multiple patents and is very involved in the community, as the Lead Organizer of the Cambridge Parent Summit.
Ben Calhoun received his BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, in 2000. He received the MS degree and PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. In January 2006, he joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where he is now a Professor. His research has emphasized energy efficient and sub-threshold integrated circuit design for self-powered, battery-less wireless sensing systems. Dr. Calhoun has over 200 peer reviewed publications and 22 issued US patents. He co-founded and is co-CTO at Everactive, Inc., which is selling self-powered, energy harvesting wireless sensing solutions in the industrial IoT market. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
Christian Umbach is Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer of API and data integration platform xapix.io, which empowers enterprises to exchange data - driving new digital business models and artificial intelligence around IoT data from mobility to logistics and manufacturing. He is a also a Graduate Fellow in System Design and Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has spent his career at the intersection of transportation, information technology and digital management. Formerly, Umbach held the following positions and made key achievements: Developer Advocate, UBER Technologies; Research Assistant, MIT Sloan’s Initiative on the Digital Economy on corporate innovation, where he led a team at MIT to build the next generation of digital transport products for Hyperloop Transport Technologies; Executive Assistant to the Board for Finance, Human Resources and Information Technology, Lufthansa Cargo; co-created the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, Berlin, building new partnerships and leading the open data strategy for Lufthansa Group; helped build the G20 Foundation; and with fellow World Economic Forum Global Shapers, has built up the NextB2BForum, which strengthens the collaboration of corporations and start-ups, focusing on innovation and trends in the mobility sector.
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.
Ajanta Adhikari is the Founder, CEO, and President of Ionate, a platform which combines serverless and supercomputing to enable higher utilization of infrastructure at a much lower cost. Adhikari is an industry veteran in cloud, big data, and identity infrastructure. Adhikari has a decade of Akamai expereince, conceptualized Akamai’s intelligent platform, and is a Danny Lewin award winner.
Dr. Knezevic, from Perth, Western Australia, is the CTO of Akselos. In this role, he has coordinated the delivery of simulation frameworks to the Power Systems and Mining industries. He holds a Ph.D. from Oxford (Rhodes scholar) and was a post-doc at MIT where he worked on Akselos' core technology. He was a Lecturer at Harvard University for three years before joining Akselos full time.
In 2015 David has represented Akselos at numerous prestigious conferences, like the ASME TurboExpo 2015, and the ‘Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS)’, where he’s part of the Initiative Advisory Committee Meeting. He has access to a vast network of leaders and practitioners who play a role in shaping the future of the field.
David is a co-author (with colleagues from MIT) of the patent "Methods and apparatus for constructing and analyzing component-based models of engineering systems" that is one of the foundations of Akselos' technology.
In September 2011, Dr. Knezevic was part of the team that won the largest Deshpande innovation grant at MIT, which led to the launch of Akselos.
Dr. Jill S. Becker is CEO of Kebotix, a technology platform company for new AI-discovered chemicals & materials. Jill has done a lot of other entrepreneurial endevours including founding two successful tech companies, 02139 & Cambridge NanoTech. She is a past Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner in energy & materials and a YPOer. Jill earned her PhD & MA in chemistry from Harvard. In her spare time, besides travelling, she loves to spend time with her friends & family. Like most chemists’ Jill is a foodie and deeply appreciates hauté gastronomy.
Jean Paul Crouzoulon has a track record in successful repositioning, change management and profitable growth of industry leading organizations, with proven successes in Energy, Clean Tech, High Tech, Water Conservation, IT and Outsourcing industries in the US, in Western and Eastern Europe, in Australia, in Russia and in India.
Currently Senior Vice-President at Foxtrot Systems, Inc, based in San Francisco, California, Jean Paul is in charge of Business Expansion and Professional Services, enabling customers to digitize and automate their logistic operations to deploy innovative strategies, turning logistics into a business enabler.
Prior to Foxtrot, Jean Paul turned around and doubled Rain Bird’s operations in Australia dedicated to smart irrigation and water conservation solutions.
Prior to Rain Bird, Jean Paul worked for more than 10 years at AREVA, worldwide leader of CO2 free power generation manufacturer where he held senior executive positions in renewable and nuclear power in North America. During that period, AREVA’ North American revenue grew from $0.5B to $2.3B.
Prior to AREVA, Jean Paul worked for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for more than fifteen years where he held senior management positions in Europe including General Manager of the Retail and Consumer Goods Business Unit, where under his leadership the business unit multiplied revenue 10X.
Jean Paul holds an MBA in economics, finance and marketing from the Business School, Institut Superieur de Gestion, in Paris, France.
George Westerman is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Founder of the Global Opportunity Forum (http://gof.mit.edu).
George’s work bridges the fields of executive leadership and technology strategy. During more than 20 years with MIT Sloan School of Management, he has written three award-winning books, including Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation. As a pioneering researcher on digital transformation, George has published papers in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and other top journals. He is now focused on helping employers, educators, and other groups to rethink the process of workforce learning around the world through the GOF and several research collaborations.
George is cochair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Awards, a member of the Digital Strategy Roundtable for the US Library of Congress, and member of the Board of Directors for Workcred. He works frequently with senior management teams and industry groups around the world. Prior to earning a Doctorate from Harvard Business School, he gained more than 13 years of experience in product development and technology leadership roles.
The Covid crisis accelerated many changes already underway with digital transformation. It also introduced huge amounts of uncertainty for managers and workers. In this talk we’ll discuss how leaders can help the company, and its employees, to emerge successfully from the crisis. We’ll share research-driven insights on how you can build a more digital-ready culture that responds quickly to fast-changing conditions, how a transformative model of Learning and Development is ideally suited for the current reality, and how today’s challenges can position you to drive digital transformation more powerfully than ever before.