A major research initiative at the MIT Sloan School of Management

2012 CDB Annual

Conference Speakers

David Verrill

Mr. Verrill is Executive Director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. David helped form the Center in 1999 and acted as a consultant until assuming the Executive Directorship on July 1, 2002. Verrill’s expertise lies in Industry-University Collaborations, Technology Transfer, and Entrepreneurship Fund Raising. His professional career began as a research scientist at the famed Center for Blood Research in Boston focusing on the MHC of genetically engineered mice. After receiving his master's degree from Sloan, he joined MIT's Office of Corporate Relations where he helped initiate and build the Financial Services sector for the Industrial Liaison Program. In 1991 he became Associate Director of Corporate Development. In 1996 he left MIT and joined Xerox as Manager of International Sales and Business Development for the Adaptive Products Division. Since 1998 he has helped start two companies including Winchester International Group and the Hub Investment Group. He is still active in both companies. David was educated at Bowdoin College (AB 1983, Biology and Environmental Studies) and the MIT Sloan School of Management (SM 1987, Management). Born and raised in Maine, David lives in Carlisle, Massachusetts with his wife and their two children. He is an adventure skier and golf enthusiast.

Renée Gosline

Renée Richardson Gosline is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Management Science group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She teaches the MBA course in Branding. Professor Gosline is generally interested in how social networks affect consumer-brand relationships, and how brands serve as dynamic symbols of social status boundaries. Her current research examines how luxury brands are impacted when they are imitated by counterfeits and “knockoff” imitations. She identifies the circumstances under which imitation can validate, or contaminate, a brand. Professor Gosline’s aim is to contribute to our general understanding of how consumers define authenticity, and how this is shaped by social structure (networks and status, specifically). To this end, she employs a multi-method approach, utilizing both qualitative and experimental methods to uncover consumer insights and develop theory. Professor Gosline’s research interests also include omnivore consumer behavior, social network analysis (particularly how networks constrain consumer choice), and consumer empowerment.

Prior to joining academia, Professor Gosline worked as a Marketing practitioner. She was a Planner and Account Supervisor at Leo Burnett, and a Brand Management Associate at LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton. She has developed brand strategies for mass and niche brands. Professor Gosline holds a BA and MA in sociology and a DBA in Marketing from Harvard University.

Joyce Ann-Lindbloom Salisbury

Joyce Salisbury is Senior Manager, Global Market Research at General Motors. In this role, she oversees GM's efforts to use the Internet to supplement or replace traditional research methods, and champions the vision of digitalizing “Market Research of the Future”. She has the responsibility for identifying and testing new methods and technologies to enhance GM’s understanding of the automotive consumer including marketing models using real-world data, online consumer communities, internal research communities and mobile research. In addition to driving innovations in Market Research, Salisbury serves as a liaison to many university projects. Salisbury holds a bachelor's degree in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from GMI Engineering and Management Institute (now Kettering University) and a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Engineering Management from Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.

Gui Liberali

Dr. Gui Liberali is a research affiliate at MIT and an assistant professor of marketing at the Erasmus School of Economics of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In 2010 he was a finalist of the John Little Award (Marketing/Management Science). In the same year, he received the 2010 Emerald Group Citation of Excellence (given to the top 50 of 15,000 papers published in management journals in 2009). He was a visit scholar at the marketing department of the Sloan School of Management/Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for five years, and a post-doc there for one year. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa in 2004–2005. His research has been published in Marketing Science, Sloan Management Review, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and European Journal of Operational Research. His research interests include multi-armed bandits, morphing theory and applications (e.g., website morphing, ad morphing), clickstream analysis, dynamic programming, new products, and product line optimization. He is the co-director of the Erasmus Center for Marketing of Innovations (www.erim.nl/ecmi).

Glen Urban

Glen Urban is the David Austin Professor in Management, Professor of Marketing, Dean Emeritus, and Chair of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Urban concentrates on the fascinating area of trust-based marketing on the Internet. In particular, he explores how trust is built on a website, how site design can maximize sales and trust, and how a trust-based marketing system could provide an alternative to the “push” type of marketing commonly observed. His recent research concentrates on morphing a website to fit individual cognitive and cultural style. Most recent research is on new versus old media. Forced exposure measures are taken on pre/post basis to assess the impact to TV, Search, Banners, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and YouTube on consideration, preference and purchase and integrated in a model to allocate funds between media and set total budgets.

Urban holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin as well as a PhD in marketing from Northwestern University.

Shigeto Takei

Shigeto Takei is a Visiting Scientist at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Suruga Bank, a regional bank in Japan and Founding Sponsor of the Center for Digital Business, whose assets total $40 billion and operate 127 domestic branches, sponsors Mr. Takei in attending MIT. Previously, Mr. Takei served as Acting General Manager of the Business Planning Division at Suruga Bank. Mr. Takei has worked to implement trust-based marketing in Japan's banking business. Currently, under the guidance of Professor Glen Urban, he is developing a trust-based mobile app for Suruga Bank.

Mike Hegener

Mike is an accomplished market research professional with General Motors Company, where he is Assistant Director – Brand Research. He and his staff are consumer insights consultants and research designers for a wide variety of functions including Advertising, Digital Marketing, Media Operations, Market & Industry Analysis, CRM, Communications and Retail Sales/Service/Parts Operations. Areas of expertise include segmentation, copy testing, projective techniques and custom research design.

Prior to Mike's 13 years of consumer insights experience, he spent 6 years in a variety of Sales roles including Sales Promotions, Auto Shows, District Sales Management and Consumer Relations. Mike holds a B.S. in General Management and MBA in Marketing from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Tom Davenport

Thomas is a renowned thought-leader who has helped hundreds of companies worldwide to revitalize their management practices. He combines his interests in business, research, and academia as the President’s Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College and as a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School for the 2012-2013 academic year. He’s also co-founder and research director of the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.

Tom has written or co-authored fourteen books, including several firsts in the areas of big data and analytics, business process reengineering, knowledge management, and the business use of enterprise systems. His concept of big data and analytics as a competitive differentiator, initially introduced in aHarvard Business Review article, Competing on Analytics, has been recognized by HBR editors as one the most important management ideas of the past decade and remains one of HBR’s ten must-read articles in that magazine’s 90-year history. Together with two highly acclaimed books,Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results and Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, cited by CIO Magazine as one of the all-time “Top 15 Most Groundbreaking Management Books,” his work in this area is credited with spawning “a new breed of organization.”

His most recent book is Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right. It was recently named one of the top ten business books of 2012 by Publishers Weekly. He is currently working on a new book on analytical thinking, tentatively titled Numbers Talk.

The author of hundreds of articles, columns and blogs for such publications as Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, CIO, and The Financial Times, he is quoted frequently in media such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Recognized as one of the top 25 consultants in the world and one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry, he has also directed research centers at Accenture, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, and CSC.

Tom earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in social science and has taught at the Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor of Management Science, a Professor of Information Technology, and the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Brynjolfsson explores how advances in information technology contribute to business performance and organizational change. He directs the MIT Center for Digital Business, a research initiative that analyzes the business uses of the Internet and other digital Technologies. His projects include a study of information worker productivity, a valuation method for intangible organizational capital, calibration of increased product variety online (a.k.a. the "long tail".) and an analysis of optimal pricing strategies for digital goods. In a related work, Brynjolfsson is assessing how investments in computers and networks alter economic growth, industry structure, and labor demand.

Brynjolfsson holds an AB in applied mathematics from Harvard College, an SM in decision sciences from Harvard University, and a PhD in managerial economics from MIT.

Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce.

He and Erik Brynjolfsson are co-authors of the ebook Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. The book brings together a range of data, examples, and research to show that the average US worker is being left behind by advances in technology.

He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. McAfee’s blog is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati). He also maintains a Facebook profile and Twitter account.

In addition to the blog that is part of this site, McAfee also writes a blog as part of harvardbusiness.org’s “HBR Voices.” His posts are also regularly reprinted at forbes.com.

McAfee’s book on Enterprise 2.0 was published in November 2009 by Harvard Business School Press.

In the July / August 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published “Investing in the IT that Makes a Competitive Difference,” a summary of their research investigating IT’s links to changes in competition. This work was the first to reveal that competition began to heat up in the US in the mid 1990s – to become faster paced, more turbulent, and more winner-take-all – and that this acceleration was greater in industries that spent more on IT. This research continues, and continues to highlight that technology appears to be significantly reshaping the landscape of competition.

McAfee is the author or co-author of more than 100 articles, case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. This work has convinced him that modern information technology is the most powerful tool available to business leaders, yet also the most misunderstood and under-appreciated resource at their disposal.

He has written columns for the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and Canadian Manager, and been a guest on the Charlie Rose show.

In 2008 McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He was also named by Baseline magazine to a separate, unranked list of the 50 most influential people in business IT that year. In 2009 he was the only non-executive in the Everything Channel’s group of the 100 most influential executives in the technology industry.

He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world.

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

George Westerman

George Westerman is a Research Scientist in MIT Sloan’s Center for Digital Business (CDB), and faculty chair for MIT’s executive course Transforming Your Business Through Information Technology.

George’s research and teaching examine executive-level challenges and approaches to generating value through digital technology. Key topics include innovation, risk management, and value transparency. He is currently leading a series of projects examining the transformative impact of new digital technologies – such as social media, mobile, and analytics -- on large firms and industries.

George’s book The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value was named number one in CIO Insight magazine’s Best Books of 2009. CIO Insight named his book IT Risk: Turning Business Threats into Competitive Advantage as one of the five best books of 2007.

His research has appeared in journals such as Organization Science and Sloan Management Review, and he has contributed columns to The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. He speaks regularly to academic and industry audiences, and has worked with executive teams around the world.

Prior to earning his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, George gained more than fifteen years of experience in engineering and management.

Didier Bonnet

Dr. Didier Bonnet is Global Practice Leader at Capgemini Consulting and Executive Sponsor for Capgemini Consulting’s Digital Transformation program.

Didier believes that Digital Transformation will have a profound impact on all sectors and that, over time, no company will be immune from this transformation. His interest is in understanding how technologies are impacting every aspect of business: strategy, customer experience, people and operations. In his view, the digital revolution creates huge opportunities to make organizations more efficient and responsive, to change the way people work and share, as well as strongly enhancing the experience of customers as they interact with organizations. Prior to his current role, Didier was the Global Leader of the Telecom, Media & Entertainment practice at Capgemini Consulting for 15 years. He joined the organization as a corporate strategy consultant in 1990. He has more than 25 years’ experience in strategy development, globalization, internet and digital economics as well as in business transformation for large multinational corporations. Didier also leads Capgemini Consulting’s three-year joint research program with the MIT Sloan Centre for Digital Business.

Didier graduated in Business Economics with an MBA from a French business school and holds a DPhil from Oxford University.

Gregory Gimpel

Gregory Gimpel is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Center for Digital Business. He received his BA and BS from The University of Texas at Austin, MBA in International Business from University of Southern California, and PhD in Information Systems from Copenhagen Business School. His research investigates the adoption and use of technology, leveraging IT for strategic advantage, and digital business transformation. He has presented his research at leading information systems conferences, published in international journals, and presently serves on two editorial boards. Greg served in senior management positions for a decade prior to earning his PhD, with a focus on start-up ventures, M&A, and corporate restructuring.

Geoff Parker

Geoff Parker is Professor of Management Science at the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University and Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Parker's research explores the economics of platform design and pricing. Recent work includes a cross-industry study of outsourced engineering projects, a study of pricing information products in two-sided markets with network externalities (two-sided networks), models of growth and innovation in platform markets, and an analysis of the performance of electricity markets. Dr. Parker received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering in the Technology and Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Ph.D. in Management Science from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to graduate school, Parker completed the General Electric Company Financial Management Training Program and held jobs at GE as an electrical engineer, financial analyst, and business development analyst.