John Paul MacDuffie, Professor of Management; Director, Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation (PVMI), Mack Institute of Innovation Management, The Wharton School
Serguei Netessine, Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions; Senior Vice Dean for Innovation and Global Initiatives
Serguei Netessine is Senior Vice Dean for Innovation and Global Initiatives and Professor at the Operations, Information and Decisions Department at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He lived and worked in Russia, USA, France and Singapore.
Prof. Netessine received BS/MS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology and, after working for Motorola and Lucent Technologies, he also received MS/Ph.D. degrees in Operations Management from the University of Rochester. His current research focuses on business model innovation and operational excellence and he worked on these topics with numerous government and Fortune-500 organizations including Federal Aviation Administration (USA), Government of Singapore, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, Rolls Royce, Comcast, Expedia, ABB and US Air Force. He serves on advisory boards of multiple startup companies and he is an active angel investor. Prof. Netessine also regularly participates in industry and government-organized forums on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, including World Economic Forum in Davos and World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. He was a member of the “Future of the Economy” committee for Singapore Government.
Valery Yakubovich, Executive Director, Mack Institute for Innovation Management; Senior Fellow, Wharton Center for Human Resources
Dr. Valery Yakubovich oversees all the Mack Institute’s programs and day-to-day operations. He focuses on bolstering synergy between the research, teaching, and practice of innovation management within the School; fostering dialogue between corporations and academics; and connecting with our corporate and regional partners’ innovation ecosystems.
Previously, he served as the founding executive director of Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab, where he oversaw the development of an innovative IT, data, and institutional infrastructure for large-scale open collaborative social sciences. He has diverse academic experience ranging from leading a national summer work program for university students in the former Soviet Union to conducting research, teaching, consulting, and fundraising at major academic and corporate institutions in the U.S. and Europe. Professor Yakubovich was on the management faculty of the Wharton School for several years, as well as the ESSEC Business School, where he was a full Professor of Management.
Professor Yakubovich holds an MS in mathematics from Moscow State University, an MA in sociology from the University of Warwick, and a PhD in sociology from Stanford University. His research on organizational innovations and social networks has appeared in top academic and practitioner journals, including American Sociological Review, Human Relations, Organization Science, Harvard Business Review, and California Management Review, and been featured in mass media, including the Financial Times and the New York Times.