Disruption as the New Normal
Spring 2022 ILP's in-person conferences will be open to fully vaccinated individuals only, excepting those individuals who have a medical condition or religious exemption. ILP members will use a new application developed at MIT -- Tim Tickets -- to grant campus access or scan into an event.
Disruption. It’s one of the most overused words in technology and innovation, but whether we like it or not, it’s here, it’s persistent, and it’s necessary. With the pandemic as status quo for two years, its disruptions continue to reverberate, revealing weaknesses across the global supply chain and beyond. Climate change is also disrupting the world economy, and in response, the world increasingly shows a willingness to address these challenges by disrupting the way we do business now and in the future. Underneath all of this lies technology – a disruptive force in and of itself, but also a key part of the global reaction to these unavoidable disruptions.
Both historically and currently, MIT has played a key role in studying and responding to disruption. In manufacturing industries, we are helping to design resilient supply chains, flexible and automated plants and equipment, sustainable transportation alternatives for distribution, immersive technologies to enable global collaboration, and many other innovations well-suited to the present “new normal” in which change is the only certainty.
In this focused one-day event, the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange, in partnership with our industrial members and the MIT innovation ecosystem, will examine the state of manufacturing today, what we have learned in the past two years (and more), and where things might go in the future. We’ll hear from MIT faculty and researchers, MIT-connected startups, and industry experts, all of us working together to seek a new normal.
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Ron Spangler serves as the Director of Corporate Relations, managing a diverse portfolio of companies in the mining, energy, aerospace, and defense sectors. Before joining MIT Corporate Relations, Ron dedicated two decades to an industry career, primarily focusing on various MIT-connected startup companies. In 1994, he earned his doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, and his extensive contributions include numerous publications and patents. Notably, Ron is also an FAA-licensed pilot with a glider rating.
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.
Job openings in U.S. manufacturing spiked during 2021, but workforce challenges are nothing new: factories have been struggling to recruit and retain workers for more than a decade. This presentation will examine the roots of the problem, as well as how some firms are adapting more successfully than others.
J.J. Laukaitis joined the Industrial Liaison Program in 2012 and is a strong believer in the amplifying power that comes from building enduring relationships between industry leaders and MIT researchers and innovators.
J.J. has over 25 years of experience in engineering, product management and commercial sales management across multiple industries including mechanical design and manufacturing, electronics, semiconductor equipment, health care IT and renewable energy.
In his work for PTC, Continuum, Teradyne, DFT Microsystems and GE, J.J. has managed programs to conceive, design and launch new products and services and has led major initiatives to transform customer information into insight for revenue growth.
Thomas A. Kochan is the Post-Tenure George Maverick Bunker Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty member in the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.
Kochan focuses on the need to update America's work and employment policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing workforce and economy. His recent work calls attention to the need for a new social contract at work, one that anticipates and engages current and future technological changes in ways that build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. Through empirical research, he demonstrates that fundamental changes in the quality of employee and labor‐management relations are needed to address America's critical problems in industries ranging from healthcare to airlines to manufacturing. His most recent book is Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2021).
He is a member of the National Academy of Human Resources, the National Academy of Arbitrators, and past president of the International Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association. Currently he is member of the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future.
Kochan holds a BBA in personnel management as well as an MS and a PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin.
Duane is an accomplished Supply Chain Executive driving profitability and growth with the water technology company Xylem, Inc. He is responsible for the development and execution of the end-to-end Supply Chain for a $1b business unit.
Duane has over 25 years of experience in Manufacturing and Supply Chain operations including multiple Executive-level roles with increasing responsibility at Xylem. He is also a veteran of the United States Navy submarine force.
Michael McDonnell, Amsted Rail’s Vice President and Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, joined the company in August 2008. During a 21 year career in the transportation logistics and telecommunication industries, Michael demonstrated himself as an agent of growth and leadership. He is responsible for all technology aspects of Amsted Rail, including people development, global technology strategy, business enablement, and resiliency. As Chief Innovation Officer for Amsted Rail, Michael is responsible for developing a grassroots innovation program into a core competency within all aspects of Amsted Rail. Before joining Amsted Rail, Michael served in a number of different technology leadership roles at both YRC Worldwide and Sprint Corporation. Michael has completed Innovation training at the University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, and the University of California – Berkeley. Michael has also partnered with MIT to connect Amsted Rail with MIT’s innovation ecosystem. Through this training, Michael has participated in the course development, delivery, and application of materials at Amsted Rail (University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, and MIT). Michael holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Business Administration from Baker University and an MBA from Rockhurst University which are located in the Kansas City metro area.
Principal Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative, Co-founder and CEO, Sesame Sustainability
Emre Gençer is a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, and a co-founder and CEO at Sesame Sustaınability.
The central theme of his research is to identify optimal utilization of resources for the evolving energy system facing the dual challenge of increasing demand while profoundly reducing its environmental footprint. His research focuses on integration of emerging and conventional energy technologies, their policy implications, multiscale modeling, and optimization. He is the principal investigator of various ongoing projects at MIT including Understanding Carbon Mitigation Technologies, Analysis of Options towards Fully Decarbonized EU by 2050, and Exploring Power and Transport Sector Decarbonization Pathways via Direct and Indirect use of Electricity. He is the lead developer and chief architect of a novel software platform called Sustainable Energy Systems Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), which provides comprehensive cost and sustainability assessment for the converging electric power, transportation, and industrial sectors to decision makers and technology analysts with high technological, temporal, and geospatial resolution. He was lead on the chemical storage chapter of The Future of Energy Storage report and co-lead on the thermal storage chapter.
Jacquelyn Pless is the Fred Kayne (1960) Career Development Professor of Entrepreneurship and an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research interests are in the economics of innovation, energy and environmental economics, and public economics.
Her research focuses on understanding how policy affects firm behavior and innovation outcomes, with a particular interest in clean energy innovation. Current projects concentrate on the role of public subsidies in driving private research and development investments and the direction of innovation. Other work examines renewable energy markets and how environmental policy impacts firm competitiveness.
She holds an MS and PhD in mineral and energy economics from the Colorado School of Mines, and a BA in economics and political science from the University of Vermont.
Jacquelyn Pless is an Assistant Professor in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Fred Kayne (1960) Career Development Professor of Entrepreneurship. Her research interests are in the economics of innovation, energy and environmental economics, and public finance. Most of her work studies the effects of policies and investment (both public and private) on innovation for social progress — innovation that protects the planet and people — focusing primarily on energy and environmental innovation. One of her current obsessions is understanding how market failure interdependencies and policy interactions shape firms’ and individuals’ incentives to innovate and especially how they steer the direction of innovation.
Jacquelyn is also an Honorary Research Associate with the University of Oxford, a Research Affiliate of CESifo, and an Invited Researcher with J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative.
Before joining MIT, Jacquelyn held various positions in the public and private sectors. She worked in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and National Conference of State Legislatures supporting state and tribal governments on energy policy and project finance issues, and she was a research economist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She was also the Head of Analytics for a boutique consulting firm in the UK helping companies manage their reorganizations.
Ariadna Rodenstein is a Program Manager at MIT Startup Exchange. She joined MIT Corporate Relations as an Events Leader in September 2019 and is responsible for designing and executing startup events, including content development, coaching and hosting, and logistics. Ms. Rodenstein works closely with the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in promoting collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry, as well as with other areas around the MIT innovation ecosystem and beyond.
Prior to working for MIT Corporate Relations, she worked for over a decade at Credit Suisse Group in New York and London, in a few different roles in event management and as Director of Client Strategy. Ms. Rodenstein has combined her experience in the private sector with work at non-profits as a Consultant and Development Director at New York Immigration Coalition, Immigrant Defense Project, and Americas Society/Council of the Americas. She also served as an Officer on the Board of Directors of the Riverside Clay Tennis Association in New York for several years. Additionally, she earned her B.A. in Political Science and Communications from New York University, with coursework at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico City, and her M.A. in Sociology from the City University of New York.
David Sossen is Senior Advisor and Director of Coventry Associates and Raptor Maps. Coventry has commercialized a disruptive robotics technology aimed at subtractive manufacturing. Raptor Maps is a SaaS venture targeting the solar industry. He retired from M.I.T. in 2017 where he was a Technology Licensing Officer responsible for managing IP and licensing of inventions in Aero/Astro, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Physics. He also negotiated IP terms for research collaborations between M.I.T and government, academic and industrial organizations. He served in many volunteer capacities at M.I.T including Mentor with the Venture Mentoring Service, Catalyst with iTeams, Advisor to M.I.T. spinouts and licensees, and Advisor to the MIT 100k Competition.
He is the Founder and former CEO of TeraDiode, Inc., a venture he launched to commercialize direct-diode laser technology invented at M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory. Target industries were metal cutting and welding, and defense applications. Teradiode was acquired by Panasonic in 2017. Before that, he held senior management positions with management consultant Arthur D. Little, intellectual property marketplace yet2.com, and AlliedSignal, now part of Honeywell. He also served as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay after leaving McKinsey & Company. He has served on the Sherborn Board of Health and the Groundwater Protection Committee. Mr. Sossen holds an S.M. in Management from M.I.T, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University.
John is the VP Business Development + Partnerships at Everactive, where he’s responsible for developing and driving engagements with leading industrial equipment suppliers and service providers, and for the end-to-end development and deployment of Everactive’s data services and platform strategy. John’s work reflects his passion for opportunities at the intersection of deep tech, sustainability, and quantitative analysis.
Prior to joining Everactive, where he has also held leadership roles in sales and operations, John worked in management consulting in Washington, D.C., helping Fortune 100 healthcare and technology clients tackle their most challenging customer acquisition and retention problems. He received his MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School, and his BA from Colgate University.
Kimo Johnson is a Co-Founder and the Chief Science Officer of GelSight, Inc., a startup company focused on commercializing a soft, high-resolution tactile sensor. During his postdoc at MIT, Dr. Johnson assisted in the development of GelSight's core technology, and the work attracted the attention of scientists and engineers in various industries around the world. Today, GelSight is bringing AI to the physical world through intelligent tactile sensing for surface analytics, dexterous manipulation, and autonomous robots. Anywhere human hands are used for manufacturing, inspection, order fulfillment, and object manipulation is an opportunity for GelSight technology to automate and digitize the process.
Dr. Cyrus Shaoul obtained his BSc in Cognitive Science from MIT in 1993, and his PhD from the University of Alberta in 2012. While at MIT he was an undergraduate researcher at the Media Lab. He co-founded one of the first Internet technology companies in Japan in 1994, called Digital Garage. Cyrus is a co-founder and the CEO of Leela AI. He and his team are laser-focused on building a scalable solution to the problem of building a new, more powerful kind of visual intelligence. Cyrus speaks Japanese, French and Spanish.
Elise Jones is the Content and Experiential Marketing Lead at Tulip Interfaces. She was a co-founder of the educational non-profit organization The T. Colin Campbell Foundation (now the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies) and a contributing author to the 52-week New York Times bestseller Forks Over Knives: The Plant-based Way to Health. After spending the first part of her career in online education, publishing, and journalism, she has shifted gears to technology. Elise lives with her family in Brookline, MA.
Emily Malina is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Spoiler Alert. Emily started Spoiler Alert to help the food industry sell more, waste less, and solve some of the most pressing environmental and social challenges of our time. Before co-founding Spoiler Alert, Emily worked at Deloitte Consulting, where she specialized in technology adoption and supply chain transformation. Emily also has held a variety of product marketing, customer success, and sales roles at Yammer (acquired by Microsoft) and the Corporate Executive Board (acquired by Gartner). Originally from New York, Emily has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA from Emory University.
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.
Prior to founding Einblick in 2019, Emanuel was a postdoc in the database group at MIT and got his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University. During this time, he worked with Tim Kraska and Andy van Dam on various interactive tools for visual data exploration and analysis. Most of them either influenced or are direct predecessors of Einblick, such as Vizdom that won the VLDB best demo award in 2015.
Dave Landry began his career in graphic design, but soon moved into front-end development and engineering. He co-founded Datawheel, a small startup in Cambridge that produces large-scale automated reporting platforms that turn data into stories. Dave and his team of designers and engineers work with both public and private sector clients to unlock valuable insights from large unwieldy datasets. Additionally, Dave is the lead contributor to D3plus, an open source visualization library.
Pickle Robot | Coventry | Everactive | GelSight | Leela AI | Tulip | Spoiler Alert | iQ3Connect | Einblick | Datawheel
Bruce Lawler is a technology entrepreneur and executive leader with consecutive public and private exits, and early stage investing success with leading venture firms including Accel, CRV, KPCB, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Softbank. He is an industry thought leader and public speaker with development expertise in mobile applications, SaaS, artificial intelligence systems and video distribution networks; and an operations executive with experience ranging from consumer and industrial hardware/electronics manufacturing to wireless and video network operations (DevOps). Bruce is also President of ReBuild Digital where he is focused on rebuilding America’s manufacturing base and creating meaningful, sustainable jobs through the application of digital technologies.
In 1998 Bruce founded a company to deliver digital video over the internet and had a successful IPO 2 years later. In 2001 he founded a venture capital firm focused on investing in mobile phone technology. He invested in other successful entrepreneurs like Andy Rubin, the creator of Android. In 2003 he founded a company to write applications for mobile phones which he recently sold to Motorola.
Bruce began his career in Artificial Intelligence as a COMMON LISP developer at ICAD where he helped to automate design and manufacturing for companies that included Boeing, Airbus, GM, GE, Northrop Grumman and Ford. He also helped fast track the porting of ICADs core platform from LISP/Symbolics to C++/SUN. At Kodiak, Bruce led the development of the Kodiak Business Intelligence, a data visualization and analytics platform now used by Motorola.
Bruce attended Purdue University where he received his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering specializing in electro-mechanical control systems and was a President’s Honor Award recipient. In 1990 he was awarded the LGO Fellowship to attend MIT, where he obtained both a Master of Science in Engineering and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School.
Which companies deploy machine intelligence and data analytics successfully for manufacturing and operations? Why are those leading adopters so far ahead — and what can others learn from them? MIT Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing and Operations (MIMO) and McKinsey & Company have the answer. This talk will provide the detail behind a newly published Harvard Business Review article that reveals the findings of a 100-company quantitative and qualitative study to explain how high-performing companies successfully wield machine learning technologies (and where others could improve).
Jarrod Goentzel is founder and director of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab in the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. His research focuses on meeting human needs in resource-constrained settings through better supply chain management, information systems, and decision support technology. Dr. Goentzel leads fieldwork in a range of contexts to develop insights that improve response efforts during emergencies and strengthen supply chains in vulnerable communities. Research involves direct engagement with the private sector, government agencies, humanitarian, international development, and community organizations on several continents. Dr. Goentzel has created residential and online courses in humanitarian logistics, international operations, and supply chain finance, and has extensive experience using simulation games to build intuition and leadership skills.
Previously, Dr. Goentzel was Executive Director of the MIT Supply Chain Management (SCM) Program, a nine-month master’s degree program. He joined MIT in 2003 to establish the Zaragoza Logistics Center in Spain, which was the first node in the MIT Global SCALE Network. He received a Ph.D. from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Supply chains have been in the spotlight throughout the protracted pandemic. Discussions about resilience, which historically spike during disruption, are now more persistent. This talk explores experiences that have improved understanding of supply chains and considers how to leverage collective knowledge to increase resilience for all.
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Yuri Ramos brings 20 years of international experience, having worked with Information Technology for multinational companies in his native Brazil, throughout South America and in the United States. Before MIT, Yuri was with Santander Bank N.A., where he first worked as a Sr. Manager for online and mobile initiatives, and then as Chief of Staff for the CIO of Digital Channels.
Prior to Santander, Yuri was the co-founder and CEO of 2 startups in the EdTech space. In both endeavors he was responsible for strategy, business development and operations. Before this entrepreneurial period, Yuri held positions at Universo Online – Brazil’s largest Internet portal - as Director of Operations and Senior Manager; at ACISION as Engineering Manager (Latin America Operations) and Senior Project Manager; and at Nortel Networks as Project Manager.
Yuri earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at the University of Brasilia, and his MBA at MIT where he was a Sloan Fellow.
Dr. Erez Agmoni is the Senior VP of Innovation & Strategic Growth for Maersk in North America and after many years in Asia and Latin America he is now based in New Jersey, USA.
In this current role, Erez is managing few departments including industrial real- estate, product development, engineering design and maintenance and the Maersk Innovation Center which contains 3 legs: R&D, Digital Transformation and Data Science.
Erez has a broad industry experience of more than 25 years in supply chain management, freight forwarding, logistics, engineering and digital innovation which he utilized to develop complex solutions that improve end to end supply chains.
Erez is holding a computer engineering bachelor’s degree, telecommunication science master’s degree and a PhD in organization development.
Erez is married with three children and enjoy traveling, hiking and mountain biking in his spare time
Erez enjoy meeting and learning new cultures and can speak Hebrew (native), English & Thai fluently and he is at a beginner level in Japanese.
Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a member of the Operations Management Group at Sloan and affiliated with the Operations Research Center. Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Levi spent more than 11 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an Officer in the Intelligence Wing and was designated as an Extra Merit Officer. After leaving the Military, Levi joined and emerging new Israeli hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant.
Levi's current research is focused on the design of analytical data-driven decision support models and tools addressing complex business and system design decisions under uncertainty in areas, such as health and healthcare management, supply chain, procurement and inventory management, revenue management, pricing optimization and logistics. He is interested in the theory underlying these models and algorithms, as well as their computational and organizational applicability in practical settings. Levi is leading several industry-based collaborative research efforts with some of the major academic hospitals in the Boston area, such as Mass General Hospital (MGH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Children’s Hospital, and across the US (e.g., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC Prebyterian Hospital System and the American Association of Medical Colleges). Levi is the lead PI on an MIT contract with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to develop systematic risk management approach to address risk related to economically motivated adulterations of food and drug products manufactured in China. He has also been involved in developing operational risk and process safety management methodologies for various organizations, in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries. Levi received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, the 2008 INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers and the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize.
Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Designing Reality, Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of 40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. He's been called the intellectual father of the maker movement, founding a growing global network of over two thousand fab labs in 125 countries that provide widespread access to prototype tools for personal fabrication, directing the Fab Academy for distributed research and education in the principles and practices of digital fabrication, and chairing the Fab Foundation. He is a co-founder of the Interspecies Internet and of the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College, Strathclyde University and the University of Antwerp, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.