Soumitra Dutta, PhD, Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean, Professor of Management and Organizations, Cornell University

Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

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Soumitra Dutta is the eleventh dean and professor of management and organizations in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate Questrom School of Business at Cornell University. He most recently served as the Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Business and Technology and was the founder and academic director of the eLab at INSEAD, a top-ranked graduate business school in Fontainebleau, France.

Previous roles Dutta has held during his 23-year tenure at INSEAD include dean of external relations; dean of executive education; and dean of technology and e-learning. He has served as a visiting professor in the Haas School at Berkeley, Oxford Internet Institute at University of Oxford, and Judge School at University of Cambridge in England. He has lived and worked in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including stints as an engineer with GE in the U.S. and Schlumberger in Japan.

Dutta is an authority on the impact of new technology on the business world, especially social media and social networking, and on strategies for driving growth and innovation by embracing the digital economy. He is the co-editor and author respectively of two influential reports in technology and innovation — the Global Information Technology Report (co-published with the World Economic Forum) and the Global Innovation Index (to be co-published with the World Intellectual Property Organization). Both reports have been used by several governments around the world in assessing and planning their technology and innovation policies.

His work has been widely published in the Harvard Business Review, European Management Journal, Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and other journals. Dutta and his ideas have been featured in myriad business magazines, newspapers, and blogs, including Global Intelligence for the CIO, Information Week, Brasil, BusinessWorld India, Chief Executive, Finance & Management, Chief Executive Magazine, Forbes, and The McKinsey Quarterly.

Dutta is a member of the Davos Circle, an association of long-time participants in the Annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum, and has engaged in a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives to shape global, regional and industry agendas. He is on the advisory boards of several international business schools. He has co-founded two firms and is on the boards of several startups. He received the European Case of the Year award from the European Case Clearing House in 2002, 2000, 1998, and 1997.

Dutta received a B.Tech. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He received an MS in business administration, an MS in computer science, and a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Peter Wexler, Cofounder, SpiderCloud Wireless

Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

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Peter Wexler is an Engineer, entrepreneur, and Investor currently focusing on Internet and mobile technologies. He has been instrumental in helping to evolve the computer networking industry into the globally connected, broadband environment that we know today. During the past 25 years, he has led the development of key products that form the foundation of the Internet and today’s rapidly growing mobile networks. Currently he is a co-founder, investor and Director of Spidercloud Wireless. The company, develops devices and systems that provide very dense indoor licensed spectrum to feed the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices. 

Peter was the founding Vice President of Engineering at Juniper Networks. During his tenure at Juniper, Peter grew the engineering organization from 17 to 600, helped lead the company from initial product through IPO, and oversaw the delivery of multiple generations of high-performance routers that power much of today’s high-speed Internet. Subsequently he managed Juniper’s Mobile Business Unit and was a Director of the Ericsson-Juniper joint venture company. Previously Peter has held Engineering and management positions at a number of Companies including Bay Networks, Wellfleet communications and Siemens.

His good fortune has enabled him to help take a number of companies public, raise many rounds of venture financing, work with insanely great people, and to be part of global organizations ranging in size from 10 to 440,000. He has also shared in the heartbreak of, on occasion, developing great technology 5 years before there was a market.

Peter serves on a number of private company boards and is a member of the University of Illinois Engineering Advisory Board as well as the Boston University Questrom School of Business Advisory Board. He has an MBA from Boston University, an MSE from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BSEE from SUNY Stonybrook.

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James Post, PhD, John F. Smith, Jr. Professorship in Management, Boston University Questrom School of Business

Forum: Fostering Ethical Leadership

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James E. Post holds the John F. Smith, Jr. Professorship in Management. He is a member of the Business Policy & Law Department and teaches courses in strategic management, professional ethics and responsibility, and corporate governance. He is the author or co-author of many books, including “Redefining the Corporation,” with L. Preston and S. Sachs, a study of governance and accountability.

 

See other Boston University VIPs:  Ken FreemanRobert A. Brown, Michael Salinger, N. Venkatraman

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Sri Zaheer, PhD, Dean, Carlson Questrom School of Business, University of Minnesota

Forum: Cultivating Research with Impact

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Sri Zaheer joined the Carlson School in 1991 and most recently held the position of associate dean of faculty and research. Zaheer is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and is a former consulting editor of the Journal of International Business Studies. Her research centers around the risks faced by multinational corporations, and on the impact of technology on international location and organization. She has won several international awards for her research including the Barry Richman Award for the best interdisciplinary work in international management. Zaheer is a founding member of the International Academic Council of the Indian School of Business, set up by McKinsey, Kellogg, and Wharton in Hyderabad, India.

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N. Venkatraman, PhD, David J. McGrath Jr. Professor of Management at Boston University Questrom School of Business

Forum: Increasing the Value of Management Education

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N. Venkatraman is the David J. McGrath Jr. Professor of Management at Boston University Questrom School of Business. Previously, he taught at MIT Sloan School (1984-1993) and London Business School (1999-2001). He was awarded the 2004 and 2006 IBM Faculty Fellowship for his work focusing on business

challenges in the network era. His research and teaching lie at the interface between strategic management and information technology with a particular focus on how companies position to win in a network era. He has been recently recognized by Thomson Financial/ISI as one of the most cited researchers in strategy and information technology. His 1989 paper in Management Science is considered as one of the highly cited papers over the 50 years of the history of the journal. His research has won awards from The Academy of Management (AT Kearney Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research) and Strategic Management Society (McKinsey Honorable Mention) and his doctoral students have been awarded prizes for their thesis work.

He writes papers for managerial audience and academic publications. His papers for managers have been published in the Sloan Management Review over the last decade. He has also published in IBM Systems Journal (1993 Special Issue on Strategic Alignment; the Turning Points issue in 2000), Business Strategy Review (London Business School) and Financial Times. His academic research has been published in Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Information Systems Review, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and others. He has consulted and/or lectured for many corporations in the USA, Europe and South Africa including IBM, Microsoft, CSC, BP, Novartis, Ericsson, Canal+, ABN-AMRO, Zurich Financial, McKinsey & Co., Federal Express and others.
He holds a B. Tech degree from IIT, Kharagpur (1976), an MBA from IIM Calcutta (1979); and Ph.D. from University of Pittsburgh (1985).

See other Boston University VIPs: Robert A. Brown, Ken FreemanJames Post, Michael Salinger

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Howard Thomas, PhD, LKCSB Distinguished Term Professor of Strategic Management, Management Education Director, Academic Strategy and Consulting Unit, Singapore Management University

Forum: Supporting 21st Century Competencies

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Professor Howard Thomas has had a distinguished, global career in business and management education spanning almost 50 years.

He has been a business school Dean on three continents: University of Illinois, USA; Warwick Business School, UK and Singapore Management University, Asia.

His teaching and research interests encompass strategic management and management education. He is a highly-cited scholar, who is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, USA, the British Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. He is also a Companion of the Association of Business Schools, UK.  He is a past Chair of the Board of the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB), the Association of Business Schools (ABS) and the Global Foundation of Management Education (GFME). He also served as President of the Strategic Management Society.

He has held visiting and permanent academic posts at institutions worldwide: the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) in Sydney, London Business School, Sloan School of Management, MIT, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern, EIASM, Brussels, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He serves as a board member of State Farm Bank, USA, and the European Foundation for Management Development, (EFMD), Brussels.  He is also a Member of the Financial Research Council (FRC) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

He recently authored ‘The Business School in the 21st Century’ (with Peter Lorange and Jagdish Sheth) Cambridge University Press, 2013, ‘Promises Fulfilled and Unfulfilled in Management Education’ Emerald, 2013 and ‘Securing the Future of Management Education: Competitive Destruction or Constructive Innovation?’ Emerald, 2014.

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Peter Rohan, Senior Member of Ernst & Young’s Education Industry Group

Forum: Driving Learning Experiences

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Peter is a senior member of Ernst & Young’s Education Industry Group. He has extensive experience both locally and internationally. Peter’s key expertise is in public policy reform, strategy & operational improvement and organisational change. He has over 25 years’ experience in leading and managing important projects across a variety of organisations and a diverse range of stakeholder groups.

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Martin Nisenholtz, Former Chief Digital Officer, The New York Times Company

Forum: Harnessing Digital Technology

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Martin is a Venture Partner at Firstmark Capital in New York and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He recently completed a Fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he co-developed Riptide: An Oral History of the Epic Collision between Journalism and Digital Technology, 1980 to the Present (www.digitalriptide.org).  Martin currently serves on the boards of PostMedia Networks (PNC/A), Yellow Media (Y:CN), Exelate, Sulia and RealMatch. He is an advisor to Carmel Ventures and the Online Publishers Association.

From 1995-2012, Martin managed digital operations for The New York Times Company and was the founding leader at nytimes.com in 1996.  In 1983, Martin founded the Interactive Marketing Group (IMG) at Ogilvy & Mather. IMG was the first digital agency at a major US advertising firm.  In 2002, Martin founded the Online Publishers Association, today the leading trade association among quality content providers. Martin began his career as a research scientist and assistant professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he serves on the Alumni Board.

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Dan LeClair, PhD, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, AACSB

Forum: Evaluating Policy & Rankings

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As executive vice president and chief operating officer, Dan LeClair provides leadership for AACSB’s efforts to advance quality management education worldwide through a wide range of data, education, research, and communication services. LeClair was the principal architect of AACSB’s Knowledge Services, which assists business school leaders worldwide to plan and make decisions using comparable data and information about trends and effective practices. He leads the research teams of AACSB and the Global Foundation for Management Education (GFME), a think tank joint venture of AACSB and the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and serves on the steering committee of the UN Global Compact’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Dan has served on numerous industry-wide committees and task forces for organizations, such as GMAC®, EMBA Council, Association of Business Schools, and Aspen Institute Business & Society Program. In the Tampa Bay community, Dan serves on the Board of the Economic Development Corporation and its Life Sciences Task Force.

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Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño, Dean of IE Business School and the President of IE University

Forum: Challenging the Business Model of Education

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Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño is the Dean of IE Business School and the President of IE University. He holds a Degree in Law and a Ph.D. in Moral Philosophy and Jurisprudence (Complutense University, Spain) and an MBA (IE Business School). He was a Recognized Student at Oxford University, UK.

Iñiguez has worked as a management consultant and has played an active role in the field of quality control and development of management education in Europe. He is the Chairman of GFME (Global Foundation for Management Education) and Chairman of the European Advisory Council of AACSB International, He serves on the boards of CENTRUM (Universidad Católica, Perú),Antai Business School (Jiao Tong University, China), Renmin University Business School (China) and Mazars University (France), FGV-EASP. Fundaçao Getulio Vargas (Brazil). He was portrayed by the Financial Times as “one of the most significant figures in promoting European business schools internationally”. Iñiguez is also President of the IE Fund in the US.

Iñiguez is Professor of Strategic Management at IE Business School. His book, “The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Reinventing Education” (https://thelearningcurvebook.com ), published in 2011, deals with the future challenges of management education. He is co-editor of www.deanstalk.net, a blog focused on management education issues. Iniguez is a regular speaker at international conferences and frequently contributes in different journals and media on higher education and executive development. ​

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