Action Learning at MIT Sloan

Support Staff

Name: Emily McDonald
Tel: (617) 253-0495
E-mail: emcdonal@mit.edu

Group(s)

Marketing

General Expertise

Franchises; Marketing channels; Sales and sales processes; Trust-based marketing

Biography

Sharmila C. Chatterjee is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Chatterjee is the faculty designate for MarketLab, a signature project-based learning initiative that gives MIT students the opportunity to perform consulting projects with top consumer and enterprise brands, startups, and nonprofits. Prior to MIT, she was the Nagel T. Miner Professor and chair of the Department of Marketing and Public Relations at Golden Gate University, San Francisco.

A business-to-business marketing expert, she examines issues in the domains of distribution channels, sales force management and relationship marketing. In the area of sales force management, she carried out some of the first studies in the critical area of sales-marketing interface, specifically sales lead management. Chatterjee is interested in the effective management of the sales-marketing interface with a view toward appropriate allocation of resources between customer acquisition and retention activities. Recently, she has become interested in the diffusion of technological innovations among users at client organizations. Though primarily an expert in business-to-business marketing, Chatterjee has done research in business-to-consumers in the domains of brand trust, financial literacy, and cultural marketing. Her work has been published in Marketing Letters, The Marketing Report, Journal of Retailing, Marketing Management Journal, and Behaviormetrika, among others. She is an award-winning case writer, and several of her cases have placed first in the Direct Marketing Association case-writing competitions.

Chatterjee holds a Masters in Marketing Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and a PhD in marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. 

Web Site: http://sharmila.scripts.mit.edu/

Publications

Sa Vinhas, Alberto, Sharmila C. Chatterjee, Shantanu Dutta, Adam J. Fein, Joseph Lajos, Scott Neslin, William Ross, Lisa Scheer, Qiong Wang (forthcoming 2010), "Channel Design, Coordination and Performance: Future Research Directions," Marketing Letters.

Chatterjee, Sharmila C. and Blodwen Tarter (forthcoming 2009), "Visa USA: Debit Card Services," in The IMC Handbook: Readings and Cases in Integrated Marketing Communications, eds. J. Steven Kelly and Susan K. Jones, Rancom Communications.

Chatterjee, Sharmila C. and Arjun Chaudhuri (2005), "Are Trusted Brands Important," Marketing Management Journal, Spring, 1-16.

View complete list of publications >>

Support Staff

Name: Ariel Brandner
Tel: (617) 253-6605
E-mail: abrandne@mit.edu

Group(s)

Operations Management

System Dynamics

Research Center(s)

Operations Research Center

General Expertise

Applied math; Applied probability; Business intelligence; Competition; Convergence; Decision making, decision support; Facility location; Healthcare operations management; Infrastructures; Inventory; Logistics; Manufacturing management; Manufacturing systems; Mathematical programming; Medical decision making with technological advances; Medicine; Middle East; Operations management; Operations research; Optimal control; Optimization; Price fixing; Probability, applied; Process control; Production; Project management; Revenue management optimization; Sampling; Statistics; Stochastic modeling; Supply chain management; Terrorism; Vehicle routing

Biography

Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management and an Associate Professor of Operations Managementat the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Levi’s current research is focused on the design and performance analysis of efficient algorithms for fundamental stochastic and deterministic optimization models that arise in the context of supply chains, revenue management, logistics, and healthcare. These fundamental, multistage stochastic models are typically difficult to solve optimally, both theoretically and in practice. Hence, it is important to develop efficient heuristics that provide provably near-optimal policies for these hard models. Levi has a special interest in cost-balancing techniques, data-driven (sampling-based) algorithms, and modern linear programming-based approximation techniques applied to models in the above domains. In addition, he is interested in stochastic and combinatorial optimization and mathematical programming in their broad definition, especially in their intersection with problems that arise in the context of real-life applications. Levi is affiliated with MIT’s Master of Science Program in Computation for Design and Optimization.

He was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and served for about 12 years as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces. In 2005, he received the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences awarded by the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Levi holds a BS in mathematics from Tel-Aviv University and a PhD in operations research from Cornell University.

Web Site: http://web.mit.edu/retsef/www/

Publications

Provably Near-Optimal LP-Based Policies for Revenue Management in Systems with Reusable Resources [2008]

Support Staff

Name: Jason Robert Clinkscales
Tel: (617) 253-4936
E-mail: jclinksc@mit.edu

Group(s)

Marketing

Operations Research

Statistics

Research Center(s)

MIT Center for Digital Business

Operations Research Center

General Expertise

Applied probability; Bayesian statistics; Cable industry; Consumer measurement; Customer relationships and CRM; E-commerce; Electronic media; Insurance; Internet; Market research; Media; Online shopping; Product loyalty; Statistics; Web-based marketing

Biography

Michael Braun is the Homer A. Burnell (1928) Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

His research focuses on the development of probability models to tackle business problems as diverse as customizing websites, forecasting customer retention, predicting insurance claims behavior, and modeling interdependency among customer preferences. In particular, he is interested in developing models of network interactions and discrete choice behavior that can be estimated efficiently on massively large datasets.

Before entering academia, Braun worked on the development and deployment of broadband Internet products for such companies as Comcast, Marcus Cable, and Charter Communications. From 1999 to 2002, he was vice president for Global Affiliate Operations of Chello Broadband, the Amsterdam-based Internet arm of United Pan-Europe Communications, the largest cable operator in Europe. An avid sports fan, he also worked as a production assistant at ESPN and as a researcher for NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. He is a member of INFORMS, the American Statistical Association, and the American Marketing Association.

Braun holds an AB in economics from Princeton University, an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  

Web Site: http://scripts.mit.edu/~braunm/

Publications

Morph the Web to Build Empathy, Trust and Sales [2009]

Website Morphing [2009]

View complete list of publications (PDF) >>

Support Staff

Name: Patricia Curley
Tel: (617) 253-5701
E-mail: pcurley@mit.edu

Group(s)

Global Economics and Management

General Expertise

Strategic management, Public policy; EU, Scandinavia; High tech (IT, Cleantech); impact, e-government; Knowledge work, networks; Leadership from below; New Ventures

Biography

Trond Undheim is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He teaches and mentors across MIT Sloan Action Labs (China/India Lab, G-Lab, EM-Lab, GO-Lab), and manages industry relationships. Trond is a leading expert on strategy, technology policy, entrepreneurship, and the role of technology in society. Previously, he was the director of standards strategy and policy at Oracle Corporation where he lead global business development, drove standardization, and influenced government policy in the EU. He also served as the national expert of e-government in the European Commission, where he created ePractice.eu, the world's most successful best practice initiative in e-government, e-health, and e-inclusion. As project manager at the Norwegian Board of Technology, he coached high-level expert groups on Cleantech and Software policy which led to government policy on open standards. At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, his research project on electric vehicles was funded by the European Union. Undheim also ran the business incubator Innovision AS, where he sought seed capital for startups, two of which (Falanx and Plasus Technologies) were later acquired.

Undheim is the author of Leadership From Below (2008), which explains how the influx of ideas from Asia, Scandinavia, and social networking is changing the workplace. He is the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of ePractice, a Fellow at the Research Group for Marketing and Consumer Science, KU Leuven in Belgium, and a former visiting researcher at UC Berkeley. He is also the wine columnist for Color Magazine USA.

His research interests include strategic management, innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and e-government, particularly applied to high tech and emerging markets. He regularly speaks to global audiences.

Undheim holds an MA in sociology and a PhD in sociological technology and policy studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Web Site: http://trondundheim.com/

Support Staff

Name: Adel Donegan
Tel: (617) 258-8360
E-mail: adonegan@mit.edu

Group(s)

Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management

General Expertise

Alliances; Artificial intelligence; Change management; Competitive strategy; Convergence; Entrepreneurial management; High technology companies; Information technology; Innovation; Management of technology; Networking, personal, business, organizational; Organization studies; Organizational behavior; Research and development; Silicon Valley; Strategic management; Technological innovation; Technology strategy; Technology transfer

Biography

Jason Davis is an Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Davis focuses his work on the role of organizational structures and processes in competitive strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Using a combination of inductive multi-case studies and simulation modeling, he draws upon diverse perspectives—such as complexity theory, organization theory, economic sociology, and cognitive science—to understand strategy and organizations in highly dynamic environments. His current research centers on the organization of collaborative innovation between firms in the computing and communications industries. Using data collected in the field, current projects examine the leadership processes, collaborative networks, and temporal structures underlying inter-organizational relationships.  Davis’s other research has explored how entrepreneurial firms develop the cognitive content of organizational processes, and how the amount of organizational structure shapes firm adaptation.

His work experience includes roles in alliance management and sales management in semiconductor and hardware firms, as well as strategy consulting to multiple high-tech and biotech firms.

Davis holds an SB in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT, an MS in computational and neural systems from Caltech, as well as an MA in sociology and a PhD in strategy and organizations from Stanford University. 

Web Site: http://web.mit.edu/~jasond/www/

Publications

“Learning Sequences: Their Emergence, Evolution, and Effect,” Forthcoming in Academy of Management Journal. [2011]

“Rotating Leadership and Collaborative Innovation: Recombination Processes in Symbiotic Relationships.” Accepted at Administrative Science Quarterly. (Winner, Newman Academy-Wide Award for Best Paper from a Dissertation; Winner, TIM Division Best Paper; AOM Best Paper Proceedings, TIM Division 2009). [2011]

“Optimal Structure, Market Dynamism, and the Strategy of Simple Rules,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 54: 413-452. [2009]

"Developing Theory Through Simulation Methods," Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 480-499. [2007]