MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Imperial Business Partners, Imperial College London
BT
Bringing together academics from MIT Industrial Liaison Program, BT and Imperial College London to examine innovative ideas making a difference in the world around us.
As the world experiences an unprecedented level of disruption and we are all learning a new modus operandi, we want to focus on how we can shape the new normal, from changes to the workplace and technological innovation to predicting and planning global economic trends.
What are the key dynamics that will design our future recovery as economic systems, as businesses and as employees? How can individuals and businesses ‘build back better’? Which technologies will support growth? And what are the journeys that these innovations will make to deliver measurable and meaningful impact?
Please join us for the two-part webinar series to discuss:
Session 1: The economics of recovery and growth
1 October 2020 15:00-17:00 GMT / 10:00-12:00 EDT
Featuring:
Professor Joseph Coughlin, Director at AgeLab, MIT
Professor Jonathan Haskel, Chair in Economics, Imperial College Business School and Independent member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee
Aireen Omar, President for RedBeat Ventures at AirAsia
Michael Schrage, Research Fellow at MIT Sloan School's Initiative on the Digital Economy
Session 2: The key technologies for recovery and growth
8 October 2020 15:00-17:00 GMT / 10:00-12:00 EDT
Emerging start-ups from MIT and Imperial College London
Professor Richard Templer, Director of the Cleantech Accelerator at Imperial College London
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, Kyocera Professor of Engineering, MIT (to discuss his innovation journey and startups he has founded)
Lisa Perkins, Director, BT Adastral Park and Research Realisation
Harveen Chugh, Principal Teaching Fellow in Entrepreneurship, Imperial College London
Event organisers
The MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) is industry’s most comprehensive portal to MIT, enabling companies worldwide to harness MIT resources to address current challenges and to anticipate future needs. The ILP helps company executives monitor MIT research developments, identify MIT resources of interest to member companies, arrange expert face-to-face meetings with MIT faculty, and advise members on research sponsorship and technology licensing opportunities.
The Imperial Business Partners (IBP) brings together Imperial’s academics with our closest corporate partners and policy makers, creating an accelerated platform to navigate and engage across College as well as our network of high tech start-ups, industrial collaborators and decision makers. The programme provides a unique approach to problem-solving and includes in its offering a range of specialist services, including professional development, mentoring and consultancy.
Jonathan Haskel is Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London and Director of the Doctoral Programme at the School. He was previously Professor and Head of Department at the Department of Economics, Queen Mary, University of London. He has taught at the University of Bristol and London Business School and been a visiting professor at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, USA; Stern School of Business, New York University, USA; and visiting researcher at the Australian National University.
He is an elected member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) and a research associate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, and the IZA, Bonn.
Since September 2015, he has been a member of the Financial Conduct Authority Competition Decisions Committee and the Payment System Regulator Enforcement and Competition Decisions Committee.
Since 1st February 2016, he has been a non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority.
Between 2001-2010 was a Member, Reporting Panel of the Competition Commission (now the Competition and Markets Authority), on market inquiries into Mobile Phones, Home Credit and Airports, and the EMAP/ABI merger.
He has been on the editorial boards of Economica, Journal of Industrial Economics and Economic Policy.
Between 2013 and 2016, he was an elected member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society and between November 2012 and December 2015, a member of the "Research, Innovation, and Science Policy Experts" (RISE) high level group advising the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation, and Science on policy.
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.
Aireen Omar is AirAsia Group’s President (RedBeat Ventures). She is responsible for AirAsia’s digital strategy, promoting innovation throughout the group and encouraging collaboration across AirAsia’s businesses and markets.
She oversees large, digital strategic group-wide initiatives to help transform AirAsia Group into a global, cloud and data-driven and platform company. At RedBeat Ventures, Aireen is also pivotal in incubating and growing the digital and fintech businesses such as BigLife, BigPay, Teleport, Santan and in transforming airasia.com into more than just an airline platform.
She is also a non-executive director of Tune Protect Group Berhad.
Prior to this, Aireen was AirAsia Malaysia Executive Director and CEO. Aireen joined AirAsia in January 2006 as Director of Corporate Finance, portfolio expanding quickly to also include Treasury, Fuel Procurement and Investor Relations functions. Taking on these roles, she was instrumental in shaping the development of AirAsia into one of the fastest growing and most highly-acclaimed airlines globally.
She is an Economics graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and also holds a Masters in Economics from New York University.
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.
Harveen is a Principal Teaching Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School. She is also an alum of the Business School having completed her PhD in Entrepreneurship here in 2007. She teaches entrepreneurship and strategy, as well as conducting research on entrepreneurship coaching. She was globally recognised as one of the Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors by Poets&Quants in 2019.
Her prior experience includes founding and managing VIS-3, which provided entrepreneurship programme design and coaching services to clients including Oxford University Innovation, Royal Academy of Engineering and University of Amsterdam. She also worked on the UK government's graduate entrepreneurs programme with PA Consulting Group, where she managed a portfolio of 25 startups to raise £4.97mn in equity investment.
Harveen was formerly a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Royal Holloway University of London. She has also taught entrepreneurship on the LSE Summer School and holds an MSc in Bioinformatics and BSc in Biology with Business Studies.
Professor Templer holds a joint appointment with the Department of Chemistry and the Grantham Institute. He is the Director of Development for Chemistry and the Director of Innovation at the Grantham Institute. He is the current Hofmann Chair in Chemistry and is a member of the London Sustainable Development Commission and advisory body to the Mayor of London.
Professor Templer is part of the Membrane Biophysics Platform (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/membranebiophysics) a group that includes John Seddon, Oscar Ces, Rob Law, Nick Brooks and Yuval Elani. Their group covers a wide range of interconnected research on the physico-chemical nature of lipid membranes and its application in interpreting and controlling natural and artificial phenomena in cell membranes. Professor Templer's research interests are now principally focused on manipulating the micro-mechanical stresses in lipid membranes in order to create ordered sponge-like structures that can be swollen indefinitely.
Prompted by the outcome of collaborative research on biorefining he led, Professor Templer was part of a successful bid to the European Institute for Innovation and Technology to create a Climate Knowledge Innovation Community. In 2010 he became the Director of Climate-KIC UK and Director of Education. He and his team created a programme of education to inspire climate innovators and entrepreneurs and developed and ran the UK Cleantech Accelerator. The education programme has now trained almost 2,000 students in the arts of environmentally sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship and the accelerator has graduated 50 new cleantech businesses that have between them raised $180M in investment since 2012.
Professor Templer stood down from the Climate-KIC in 2015 and joined the Grantham Institute to work on creating the Centre for Cleantech Innovation at Imperial. The Centre is now seeking to establish a co-location centre at the College's White City Campus as a collaboration with the Energy Futures Lab and the Centre for Environmental Policy. It is hoped that the centre will open by 2021. It's activities will support the education and training of cleantech innovators and entrepreneurs and enhance their R&D by enabling access to the College's science and engineering ecosystem. The Mayor of London and the UN are seeking to support the centre's establishment.
In his position on the London Sustainable Development Commission has led its work on Cleantech Innovation. This has resulted in Mayoral environmental, economic and spatial planning policy measures to support the creation of a Cleantech Innovation Cluster in London, a heightened profile for this within the Greater London Authority and an initiative to increase female participation in cleantech innovation.
The Covid-19 pandemic should have put the brakes on investments to decarbonise the global economy but we have observed the reverse. As an entry point to the presentations that follow I will talk about my personal observations and thoughts on what the pandemic has done to businesses’ response to the challenges and opportunities of climate.
Yet-Ming Chiang is Kyocera Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds S.B. and Sc.D. degrees from MIT, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. His work focuses primarily on advanced materials and their role in clean energy. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and the Materials Research Society. He has published over 200 scientific articles, one textbook, and holds about 35 issued patents and a similar number of pending patent applications. In addition to his academic research, Chiang has co-founded four companies based on research from his MIT laboratory: American Superconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: AMSC), A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE), SpringLeaf Therapeutics, and 24M Technologies. Of these, three are in the area of energy technology (Am. Super., A123, and 24M) and three grew out of research in batteries (A123, SpringLeaf and 24M). Chiang also serves on numerous government and private advisory committees and study panels, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Advisory Committee (ERAC) and Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC), the Basic Energy Sciences’ Materials Science Division’s Materials Council, Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment, and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES).
Ultralow cost renewable electricity is emerging as one of the most important tools for battling climate change, not only via the power sector, but also other industries that have been historically hard to decarbonize. A hallmark of these sectors is that the existing products are fully commoditized; and in many ways these are the most difficult areas in which to innovate. I will discuss two examples where new technology may hold the key. One is long duration electrical storage to support renewable generation, which combined could cost-effectively displace incumbent natural gas as an electricity source. A second is electrification of cement production, which is today the largest GHG emitter amongst industrial materials.
PolyJoule - Non-lithium based energy storage for the electricity grid, from MIT's Startup Exchange
SMAP Energy - graduates of the Imperial-led EIT Climate-KIC Accelerator London
Stable - Electric vehicle fleet charging, from MIT's Startup Exchange
Bumblebee Power - high-efficiency wireless charging for micro-mobility vehicles and drones
Eli Paster, CEO PolyJoule
Paul Monroe, SMAP Energy
Rohan Puri, Co-founder and CEO, Stable
Professor Paul Mitcheson, Bumblebee Power
Our shared response to the covid-19 pandemic has underlined how connected and digital our society has become. Emerging digital technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence will increasingly provide the critical fabric on which our post-Covid innovation economy can thrive and achieve its promise to tackle the biggest opportunities and challenges that we all share - such as climate change, quality of life, opportunity for all and shared economic prosperity.
This short talk will discuss BT’s approach to purposeful innovation and how it partners to build innovation journeys with personal, regional, national and global impact.