The NACS Innovation Leadership Program is administered by faculty of the Sloan School of Management. Meet the professors lined up to present at this year’s program.
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Jenny Larios Berlin is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust and a Lecturer at MIT Sloan.
Jenny was the co-founder and Chief Operations Officer for Optimus Ride, an MIT spinout, whose mission was to deploy inside of geofenced communities safe, sustainable, and equitable autonomous mobility solutions through shared and electric vehicle fleets.
Before getting acquired by Magna, a global innovator in mobility technology, Optimus Ride deployed operations in California, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Virginia, and New York, growing business operations to over 200 employees and fundraising over $75M in venture capital. It was featured in multiple news outlets, including the New York Times.
Jenny also partnered with others in the MIT community to co-found and advise limeSHIFT, another MIT spinout. limeSHIFT is a socially-driven creative agency, working at the intersection of business, community, and art. Taking a bootstrapped approach, it quickly realized revenue by partnering with organizations like Life is Good, Yale School of Management, and YouTube to implement socially engaged art.
Prior to her entrepreneurial endeavors, Jenny was entrenched in the car sharing technology industry, leading operations teams at Zipcar, Flexcar, and Hertz. At Zipcar, she scaled their university campus program and, as National Member Services Manager, was responsible for all service operations in all Zipcar cities worldwide.
She earned her bachelor’s at the University of Maryland, College Park, and two master’s – an MBA from MIT Sloan and a master’s in City Planning from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.
Jenny has a background in public private partnerships and incorporating new business concepts or leading edge technologies to create businesses that improve everyday living. She is passionate about positively impacting the way people engage with themselves and the world around them, and is excited to bring these skills to the Trust Center.
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Paul Cheek is a serial tech entrepreneur, entrepreneurship educator, and software engineer. He is the Executive Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Co-Founder of Oceanworks.
In his role as the Executive Director of the Trust Center, Paul is responsible for the development of the Trust Center’s strategy and operational plans for programs and courses. He serves as an ambassador of entrepreneurship education and MIT's perspective on it to students, alumni, and members of both the local and global entrepreneurship ecosystems.
Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Each year Paul teaches hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in the historic "New Enterprises" course, which has run for over 60 years and is believed to be the oldest entrepreneurship course in the country. He has also taught the advanced entrepreneurship course, "Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: Advanced Tools and Techniques.” From working closely with so many students, Paul identified a gap in the entrepreneurship curriculum, designed experimental entrepreneurship education content, and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”.
Outside of classes, Paul spends time coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs in a variety of programs including the MIT delta v startup accelerator, MIT fuse accelerator, Sandbox Innovation Fund, as well as other workshops and hackathons. One of which was the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, a series of global hackathons that Paul co-founded, which served over 8,500 participants around the world. To scale the impact that he and the Trust Center have within the five schools across the Institute, Paul built the digital entrepreneurship platform, Orbit, which serves over 15,000 users annually.
Paul is also a Co-Founder of Oceanworks, a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. As the CTO at Oceanworks, he developed a platform and traceability system to provide corporations with a trusted source for a variety of quality recycled ocean plastic materials at competitive prices. In the past two years, Oceanworks has diverted thousands of tonnes of plastic from the ocean, served hundreds of corporate customers in over 30 countries, and enabled the launch of a variety of high-profile sustainable products such as Clorox ocean plastic trash bags, Sperry ocean plastic boat shoes, and YKK ocean plastic zippers.
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Court Chilton is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has helped large organizations produce business results from learning, coaching, and enterprise-wide change efforts for the last 20 years. His clients have included GE Capital, Deloitte, Fidelity, MIT, Bank of America, Ixis Asset Management, Novartis, Merck, Genzyme, Shire, TJX, Home Depot, Clifford Chance, and Baker McKenzie.
Court has worked internationally on a wide variety of business-building initiatives: creating “branded client experiences;” relationship management and service improvement; sales training and leadership development; executive education and coaching; implementing Six Sigma; professional practice management, and re-engineering the learning function. In the course of these initiatives, he has also developed computer simulations, on-line 360 feedback, and process-embedded e-learning. He is an effective facilitator and coach for senior management teams.Prior to working for MIT’s Sloan School, Court was a senior vice president of The Forum Corporation, based in New York and Boston. In the course of 14 years at Forum, he was responsible for the firm’s core leadership, teaming, and total quality offerings. He also managed the $20M+ mid-Atlantic region for the firm and several strategic client relationships.
Court has worked with a number of educational institutions to design advanced courses, coach faculty, and develop tools that help link learning with work. He has also served as part of a “coaching faculty” for MBA candidates. In addition, through the District Management Council, he has consulted with educational institutions such as the Montclair (NJ) and Lancaster (PA) Public Schools to raise student achievement, decrease costs, and improve operations.
Between college and graduate school Court worked in book and magazine publishing in a variety of marketing roles. He lives outside Boston with his family. He has served on his town’s Finance Committee and recently completed four years of service on the town’s School Committee.
Court received a BA ( magna cum laude with high honors) from Middlebury College and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
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Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the head of the Human-First AI Group at MIT's Initiative on The Digital Economy.
She is a 2020 honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe,” and has been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. Gosline is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications for cognitive bias in human decision-making. She is currently completing a book on how we can be smarter in our use of friction to improve decision-making and share value.
Renée’s most recent research examines how social structure and technology intersect to affect performance and judgment, as discussed in her 2022 SXSW featured talk, "In Praise of Friction." She has also pioneered an acclaimed Executive Education course called "Breakthrough CX," which examines the nexus of Behavioral Economics, AI, and Market Stratgey.
Her academic projects have examined: how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine “real” from “fake” products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. In order to address these issues rigorously, Gosline employs experimental methodology, both in the field and the laboratory.
Renée enjoys collaborating with firms on CX, Digital Media Strategy, and Leadership. Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.
Renée conducted her Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral education at Harvard University.
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Andreas Mershin earned his MSci in Physics and Cosmology at Imperial College London and his PhD in Physics and Biophysics at Texas A&M University. He is currently a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms where he leads the Label Free Research Group that operates in blissful ignorance of any boundaries between physics, biology, materials and information sciences. From inexpensive photosynthetic solar panels to quantum effects in molecular biology and from cytoskeletal memory encoding, machine olfaction to bioenergy harvesting, his research and the resulting technologies are used by industry and government, exhibited at the Boston Museum of Science and Designer’s Open Exhibition and have been globally covered by CNN, BBC, NYT, Discovery Channel, Wired, New Scientist, Nature and Science.
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Susan Neal is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Trust Center.
She is an entrepreneur and senior executive with over 20 years of experience in eCommerce/digital, marketing, technology, and product development. In the role of CEO/co-founder, she led the launch, growth, and sale of ATACAMA, a revolutionary 3D microfluidics technology company with product applications in the apparel, healthcare, and CPG industries.
Prior to that, she held positions with increasing responsibility in two publicly-traded companies. As the EVP of Marketing, eCommerce, and Information Technology at Tailored Brands, a $2.5+ billion specialty retailer of men’s apparel (includes the Men’s Wearhouse, Jos A Banks, and Moores), Susan was responsible for strategy and the rapid revenue growth of its eCommerce operations and digital transformation. Before Tailored Brands, she was at Gymboree, a US-based children’s apparel manufacturer and retailer, where she held a variety of senior level positions overseeing eCommerce and Digital Marketing, International, and Business Development. Susan grew Gymboree’s eCommerce business from inception to $150 million in revenue.
An experienced leader, strategic thinker, and driver of digital growth and transformation, Susan holds an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France and a BA in Economics from Harvard University. She has served on multiple boards, including Shop.org, the online retailing division of the U.S. National Retail Federation. Susan loves time with her family, including discovering great restaurants, running, and hiking – summited Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2017!
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James Rhee is an impact investor, founder, CEO and educator who empowers people, brands and organizations to fulfill their true potential by marrying capital with purpose and truth across multiple systems. The acclaimed story of the remarkable transformation and re-imagination of Ashley Stewart, one of the country’s largest brands serving Black women, under his leadership as chairman, CEO and investor (2013-2020) has served as proof to millions of people, as well as the world’s leading businesses and organizations, that one can do better by being better. The reinvention of Ashley Stewart, which was facing almost certain liquidation in 2013, is proof of how trust and joy, grounded in math and amplified through digital excellence, can overcome impossible odds and fuel individual and enterprise-wide innovation. It is a tangible example of the power of diverse ecosystems, as well as a commentary on a potential way forward for achieving multi-stakeholder goals. At its core, it is also the story of an unlikely friendship between a son of Korean immigrants (who raised his hand to become the self-described “least qualified CEO”) and a predominantly Black female employee group who placed their mutual trust in each other, learned from one another, and then proceeded to quietly shock the world.
As a client of United Talent Agencies, he is a frequent speaker on impact and ESG investing, multidimensional transformation, DEI operationalization through Kindness & Math™, principled leadership, and the future co-existence of capitalism, humanism, and technology. As a senior leader of two Boston-based private equity firms, Rhee helped manage billions of dollars of growth and distressed capital before ultimately founding FirePine Group, a platform that has stewarded the capital of some of the world’s most sophisticated investors.
Rhee is at the vanguard of making knowledge, opportunity, and capital accessible to all. He holds appointments at both MIT Sloan School of Management and Duke Law School as a Senior Lecturer, where he teaches future leaders about organizational systems and deconstructed investment principles relating to money, life and joy. On March 31, 2021, Howard University announced that James would serve a three-year term as the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship as well as Senior Adviser to the newly endowed Center for Women, Gender and Global Leadership, beginning with the 2021-22 academic year. Rhee is exploring the intersection of impact investing, ESG, and financial literacy through a new venture called Red Helicopter.
Rhee connects seemingly disparate leaders and organizations that are unified in their goal to make investments and forge relationships that catalyze purposeful growth. He serves alongside global difference makers as an Advisory Council member of JPMorgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways, a member of the Governing Committee of the CEO Action for Racial Equity, and a Board Director of Conscious Capitalism. He is also a former member of the board of the National Retail Federation, where he served as chairman of the Innovation Advisory Committee.
His inspirational story has been featured in media outlets such as the Good Business Issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Thrive Global, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, Women’s Wear Daily, Morgan Stanley’s Access and Opportunity Podcast, ABC News, National Urban League’s State of Black America, and the Huffington Post.
Rhee is a regional winner of the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the winner of one of five 2016 Power Player Awards granted by the National Retail Federation, and the recipient of the 2017 Black Retail Action Group Business Achievement Award, the 2018 Temple Fox School of Business Information Technology Innovator Award, the 2018 Essex County Urban League Centennial William M. Ashby Award for community building, and a 2019 One To World Fulbright Award.
Rhee received his AB with honors from Harvard College and his JD with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three children. He is a former high school teacher. He is working on a book.
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David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches Innovation and Product Management. Over the course of his career, Dave has been a consultant at McKinsey, a senior executive at small and large technology companies, a radio show host, and a business school professor.
From 2010 through 2017, Dave was a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Wharton, he was the host of Innovation Navigation, a weekly radio show and podcast about innovation management (www.innonavi.com). From 2002 through 2009 Dave was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD). While at IMD, David was given inside access to The LEGO Group, and wrote his award-winning book Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. David’s new book, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation was published in May of 2017 by Harvard Business School Press.
David currently runs MIT’s largest and highest-rated executive program, the Executive Program in General Management. He also teaches in other MIT executive programs, consults with global Fortune 1000 companies, and is a frequent speaker at corporate events and industry trade shows.
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Zeynep Ton is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Zeynep is currently examining how organizations can design and manage their operations in a way that satisfies employees, customers, and investors simultaneously. Her earlier research focused on the critical role of store operations in retail supply chains. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and the Harvard Business Review. In addition, she has written numerous cases that explore different approaches to managing retail stores and labor.
In 2014, Zeynep published her findings in a book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. The book draws on 15 years of research to show that the key to offering good jobs to employees, great service to customers, and superior returns to investors is combining investment in employees with specific operational choices that increase employees’ productivity, contribution, and motivation.
After her book was released, retail leaders started reaching out to Zeynep to understand how to implement the Good Jobs Strategy in their organizations, or to describe how they were already adopting the strategy. Zeynep cofounded the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute to help them transform through assessments, workshops, and longer term partnerships.
Prior to MIT Sloan, Zeynep spent seven years as an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School. She has received several awards for teaching excellence both at HBS and MIT Sloan.
Zeynep lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. A native of Turkey, she first came to the US on a volleyball scholarship from the Pennsylvania State University. She received her BS in industrial and manufacturing engineering there and her DBA from the Harvard Business School.
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Melissa Webster is a Lecturer in Managerial Communication at MIT Sloan School of Management. She teaches oral, written, and interpersonal communication, persuading with data, teamwork, and leadership. Melissa also advises student teams in project-based courses (Action Learning) and co-taught Economy and Business of Modern India. Additionally, she designs modules for career development.
Melissa investigates the adoption and implications of ChatGPT and other generative AI in both professional and educational realms. Her research explores its usage by knowledge workers, and its integration in business education, with an emphasis on effective problem formulation, learning enhancements, teaching methodologies, and assessment adaptation for genAI usage.
Before joining academia, Melissa worked nearly two decades in strategy and marketing, occupying roles such as vice president of Skanska's Energy Management Group. Her industry experience includes renewable energy, software, architecture/engineering, and construction. In 2015, Melissa combined her interests in entrepreneurship and leadership to create Vulnerability Lab, which delivers programs fostering professional and personal courage.
Melissa holds a BA degree in architecture from Wellesley College and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she focused on entrepreneurship and innovation.
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George Westerman is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Founder of the Global Opportunity Initiative.
George’s work bridges the fields of executive leadership and technology strategy. During more than 20 years with MIT Sloan School of Management, he has written three award-winning books, including Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation. As a pioneering researcher on digital transformation, George has published papers in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and other top journals. He is now focused on helping employers, educators, and other groups to rethink the process of workforce learning around the world through the GOI and several research collaborations.
George is cochair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Awards, a member of the Digital Strategy Roundtable for the US Library of Congress, and learning strategy advisor to the World Health Organization Academy. He works frequently with senior management teams and industry groups around the world. Prior to earning a Doctorate from Harvard Business School, he gained more than 13 years of experience in product development and technology leadership roles.
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George is a serial entrepreneur with three degrees from MIT: BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an MEng and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering. As an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Trust Center, George is excited to help build future generations of entrepreneurs, drawing upon his experiences in innovation-driven entrepreneurship, engineering, and student life.
George’s interdisciplinary career spans computational aspects of e-commerce, FinTech, robotics, transportation, renewable energy, and nanotechnology. Today, George is the Co-Founder and CEO of FindOurView, which is extracting insights from consumer reviews and conversations to help companies do product research, using AI and machine learning. George envisions building on this work to drive mutual understanding across society.
Prior to FindOurView, George was Director of Simulation at Nucleus Scientific, where he joined as an early employee and helped grow the company by 10x in size over the course of seven years, working on electric vehicles. While in the PhD program at MIT, George co-founded and was CEO of SunPoint, a solar tracking company that won the MIT Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition and the Renewables Track of the MIT Clean Energy Prize. George also co-founded Socially Conscious Software to build mobile apps in the early days of the iPhone app store.
George was a co-instructor at MEFTI, the MIT Entrepreneurship and FinTech Integrator held at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node. He served as a co-instructor, advisor, and mentor at Station1 Socially Directed Science and Technology. George was also a guest lecturer in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department on numerical simulation. George is a recipient of the John Wulff Award for Excellence in Education, and Community Service Award from the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. George is also the author of four issued and three pending patents related to novel actuators and software control technologies. While a student, George served as President of the MIT Graduate Materials Council and a competitor on the MIT Sport Taekwondo Club.