The retail industry has been in the process of rapid change caused by advances and adoption of digital technology. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of practices like social distancing, the changing face of retail is poised to accelerate even more dramatically in the next few years. These changes will cover the entire spectrum of retail activities ranging from omni-channel consumer experience to agile supply chains. Join us, as MIT’s leading experts in retail explore the critical issues and possible new scenarios of The New Retail.
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.
This presentation will focus on the evolving applications of digitization, analytics and automation for end-to-end supply chain transformation in the retail sector which has witnessed some of the fastest digital growth.
Alex "Sandy" Pentland directs MIT's Connection Science initiative and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program and is a founding member of advisory boards for the World Economic Forum, AT&T, Telefonica, United Nations, and Nissan. He previously helped create and direct MIT's Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital's Center for Future Health.
Forbes magazine declared Pentland "one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world," along with the founders of Google and the CTO of the United States. Pentland is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in big data analytics, computational social science, organizational engineering, and wearable computing. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the World Economic Forum, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features including "Nova" and "Scientific American Frontiers." His most recent books are Social Physics, and Trust :: Data.
Interesting experiences include winning the DARPA 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge, dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space.
Concerns about data privacy, national localization, and security are driving dramatic change in the digital systems that support commerce and government. These new systems are distributed, all-digital, natively encrypted, continuously auditable, and feature automatic legal enforcement. Examples are the UBIN systems being fielded by Temasek and Singapore Monetary Authority, the Swiss Trust Chain fielded by SwissPost and SwissComm (which we helped design), and the Chinese national "smart city" system. Along with these commercial systems are financial systems that such as Fidelity's Akoya (which helped design), Intuit and EY's internal tax reconciliation systems, and the national digital currencies being test deployed or seriously considered by most OPEC nations. I will focus on
Andres Sevtsuk is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he also leads the City Form Lab. He is the author of the recent book Street Commerce: The Hidden Structure of Retail Location Patterns and Vibrant Sidewalks by Penn Pres (2020). His work bridges urban design with spatial analysis and urban technology. Andres is also the author of the Urban Network Analysis toolbox, used by researchers and practitioners around the world to model pedestrian flows along city streets and to study coordinated land use and transportation development along networks.
Street commerce has gained prominence in urban areas, where demographic shifts such as increasing numbers of single people and childless "empty nesters," along with technological innovations enabling greater flexibility of work locations and hours, have changed how people shop and dine out. Contemporary city dwellers are demanding smaller-scale stores located in public spaces that are accessible on foot or by public transit. At the same time, the emergence of online retail undermines both the dominance and viability of big-box discount businesses and drives brick and mortar stores to focus as much on the experience of shopping as on the goods and services sold. The COVID19 pandemic has further exacerbated the problems retailers already faced, but also opened up new opportunities. In light of such trends, street commerce will play an important role in twenty-first-century cities, particularly in producing far-reaching benefits for the environment and local communities.
Although street commerce is deeply intertwined with myriad contemporary urban visions and planning goals—walkability, quality of life, inclusion, equity, and economic resilience—it has rarely been the focus of systematic research and informed practice. Drawing on economic theory, urban design principles, regulatory policies, and merchant organization models, Andres Sevtsuk conceptualizes key problems and offers innovative solutions. Prof. Sevtsuk’s work on street commerce provides a range of examples from around the world to detail how different cities and communities have bolstered and reinvigorated their street commerce. According to Sevtsuk, successful street commerce can only be achieved when the private sector, urban policy makers, planners, and the public are equipped with the relevant knowledge and tools to plan and regulate it.