Jul 22, 2016

Another Great Year for the Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck

By Patrick Wheeler

Patrick is the program manager of the Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck. The CDS focuses on enabling business strategy and innovation. Digital strategies and information technologies that harness a company's unique competencies can push business strategy to a new level. At the center, we foster intellectual leadership by forging a learning community of scholars, executives, and students focused on the role of digital strategies in creating competitive advantage in corporations and value chains. We accomplish this mission by conducting high-impact research; creating a dialog between CIOs and their functional executive colleagues; and driving an understanding of digital strategies into the MBA curriculum. 

Our student programs reached a huge number of Tuck students this year from a wide-ranging list of events featuring guests from an excellent assortment of companies from around the globe..

As you can see in the infographic below, CDS welcomed 31 individual executives to campus (physically and virtually) from two dozen companies. Our programs reached an audience size of 820 students across our Britt Technology Impact Series, Digital Drop-In videoconferences, and other programming. A few highlights from the year:

• We kicked off the year in August at Google’s Mountain View headquarters with a talk from Pandora Media on the future of streaming music
• We welcomed a group of alumni MBA fellows from the classes of 2006 and 2011 back to the center to meet with MBA fellows
• The Tuck Technology Club held its annual conference to a record crowd of over 150 students in October, and included several members of the center's Roundtable on Digital Strategies as panelists on the topic of personalization technology
• Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Business Development, Jeff Blackburn D’91, filled Georgiopoulos Classroom for a unique look inside Amazon’s evolution and future growth strategies, including details on streaming video and the use of drones to deliver goods
• The team from frog design spoke to a standing room-only audience followed by a student design-thinking workshop with students, staff and faculty to practice tools used by frog designers
• MBA fellows learned about pure-play ecommerce companies moving into physical retail from Warby Parker’s Director of New Stores and Facilities, Sarah Apgar T’11 in a Digital Drop-In videoconference
• We wrapped up the year discussing topics ranging from the blockchain to autonomous vehicles with financial services companies in May