Just paying employees well isn’t enough. For a business to succeed it must have operational procedures that allow for high productivity and empower employees to contribute to a company’s success. Professor Zeynep Ton will discuss the importance of a human-centered operations strategy and how operational innovation can increase the productivity and contributions of workers and create positive outcomes where customers become fans and your organization is set up for success.
For years’ gender inequality has been prevalent in the work force. Numerous studies have examined these patterns of gender inequality in organizational advancement but findings have been less clear on the mechanisms that produce these descriptive patterns. How can we further research in this area? How can a manager prevent gender inequality? What must an organization do to ameliorate the glass ceiling? Professor Roberto Fernandez will critically review the research on gender patterns of allocation in organizational hierarchies, and present key findings drawn from his research conducted on this topic over the past 15 years.
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.
Thousands of exoplanets are known to orbit nearby stars and small rocky planets are established to be common. The ambitious goal of identifying a habitable or inhabited world is within reach. But how likely are we to succeed? The race to find habitable exoplanets has accelerated with the realization that “big Earths” transiting small stars can be both discovered and characterized with current technology. While future generations may use very large space-based telescopes to search to find signs of life amidst a yet unknown range of planetary environments, what will it take to identify such habitable worlds with the observations and theoretical tools available to us?
A million miles from Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will use infrared vision to detect the first, most distant stars and galaxies in our universe. The Webb Telescope will peer deep inside swirling disks of dust and gas encircling newborn stars where new planets are formed. It will measure the sizes of planets orbiting other stars and the compositions of their atmospheres. Seeking to answer a major question – are we alone in the universe? In this technical session, attendees will learn about JWST, by the numbers. What do 13.5 billion and 1.5 million (just to name a few) represent to JWST, the world’s largest space telescope to launch? This session will also highlight the latest integration photos of the telescope and detail the latest status of the program.
Recent technological advances in legged robots are opening up a new era of mobile robotics. In particular, legged robots have a great potential to help during disaster situations or with elderly care services. To allow for dynamic physical interactions with environments, the hardware/software design requirements of mobile robots differ from manufacturing robots (which are designed for maximum stiffness to allow for accurate and rapid position tracking without contact). Events such as the Fukushima power plant explosion highlight the need for robots that can traverse various terrains and perform dynamic physical tasks in unpredictable environments. Kim will discuss the new mobile robot design paradigm, the control algorithms for Cheetah robot version 2 and version 3, and the role of bio-inspiration in designing legged robots. Finally, Kim will compare solutions from both an engineering and biological perspective.
Five years ago, Sharon Goh started collecting stories of drive, determination, and grit, beginning with the 15-person customer support team she managed. She asked questions about how they got there and found stories of loss, pain, fear, joy, and success. These were amazing stories that needed to be told and that deeply impacted her as an executive, opening her eyes to the future of work and the power that managers have to influence it. In this talk, she will share a preview of these stories, including common themes and some of the ah-ha moments during this process. Can you drive change starting from the ground up? How do you listen and how do you prepare today for what is coming tomorrow? Her hope is to inspire individuals to rethink the future of work.
Lightning Talks Catalant Technologies, Patrick Petitti, Cofounder and CEO Catalia Health, Cory D. Kidd, Cofounder & CEO Cogito, CTO and Cofounder, Ali Azarbayejani IQ3Connect, Ali Merchant, Founder Near Field Magnetics, David McManus, Cofounder and CEO serviceMob, Anuj Bhalla, Founder and CEO TVision Insights, Dan Schiffman, Cofounder & CRO
How can you know what you don’t know? What steps can you take to break out of your bubble and see the reality of what’s happening in the world and in your business? Professor Hal Gregersen will discuss concrete ways to help you ask the right questions so that you can gain access to information about your business and break out of the CEO bubble.