Upcoming Speakers

Colin Angle
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, iRobot

Managing Innovation to Create What Customers Want

Companies that take the leap bringing an emerging technology to market face challenges like no others. A prime example is the journey of iRobot, creator of the world’s first commercially successful consumer robot.

During its beginning years, iRobot learned some extraordinary lessons. These lessons were at times trying, enlightening, and even downright amusing (such as acknowledging through a heart wrenching process that an engineer's vision of how products should be sold is not always the best!)

Join CEO Colin Angle as he reveals iRobot’s secret sauce for success, and gives insight into how you can:

• Search a new market

• Look for ways to make emerging technology products practical

• Mitigate financial risk

» Register for Colin Angle

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Deborah Ancona, Ph. D.

Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, Behavioral and Policy Sciences, MIT

X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed

In today's hyper-competitive business environment success and perhaps survival depend on innovation, speed, and organizational synergies that efficiently satisfy customer needs.  Traditional teams are often not up to this challenge.

Professor Ancona will present a new model of teams, the X-team, that illustrates how teams can become engines of innovation and execution.  Challenging the dominant wisdom that successful teams focus on internal dynamics, Ancona builds on twenty years of research to show that when teams make external activity a top priority performance takes off.  She will draw on examples from companies like BP, Microsoft, NewsCorp, and Morgan Stanley.

You will learn how to:

• Identify the attributes of high-performing, innovative teams

• Jump-start X-teams in your company

• Create teams that are a vehicle for leadership development

• Build an infrastructure of innovation in your organization

» Register for Deborah Ancona

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Jim Bramante

Managing Partner, IBM Global Business Services (GBS), Americas.

The Enterprise of the Future: Trends and Analysis for Implementing Successful Business Strategies

Leaders today must be innovative if they are to keep up with an ever more global, complex and dynamic environment. In IBM's Global CEO Study 2008, "Enterprise of the Future", they interviewed 1,000 business and public sector leaders worldwide to understand their perspective on strategic issues such as new customer groups, global integration and business model innovation.

In this session attendees will learn:
• How do organizations plan to compete in the face of globalization and increased global competition?
• What are the various factors that enable corporations to enter new locations/markets and how do they address the emergence of new global competitors?
• What impact will the increasingly acquisitive urban middle class in rapidly developing economies (RDEs) have on the enterprise?
• How do organizations meet the increasing demands of a better informed and more collaborative consumer, as well one that expects increased social responsibility
• How do companies/organizations use business model innovation to respond to the changes occurring across the value chain?

» Register for Jim Bramante

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