The Easton Technology Management Center Presents:

Tech + Society Conference 2021

Thursday, October 28

5:00 – 6:45 p.m. (Remote)

Friday, October 29

9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. (Hybrid)

We live in fascinating times - tech-based innovation offers the promise of disruptive technologies which can lower cost and improve outcomes in critical areas of societal focus. These innovations and the businesses that drive them, however, are often subject to a rapidly emerging "techlash" with a growing set of concerns about potential monopolistic behavior of large tech companies, concerns about data privacy, systemic bias embedded in algorithmic decision making, a growing digital and income divide and uncertainty about the future of work. At the core of this, a discussion around effective leadership is emerging.

Where can technology-based innovation serve society the best?
What are the potential unintended consequences of technology in society and how can these be mitigated?
And ultimately, what does success look like for leaders managing technology-based innovation in society?

2021 Speakers

Dr. John E. Kelly III has more than four decades of experience innovating and leading in the Information Technology (IT) industry.

During this time, he has played numerous significant technical and business roles driving IBM's leadership in technologies ranging from semiconductors to supercomputers to Artificial Intelligence (AI) cognitive systems. As a champion of IBM's technical community, he has kept IBM as the leader in U.S. patents for the last 28 consecutive years.

Before retiring, Dr. Kelly was responsible for helping to guide IBM's global technical and business success, focused on overseeing IBM's enterprise-wide Intellectual Property, Security and Privacy, academic, industrial, and government partnerships, as well as its technical community.

Previously, Dr. Kelly served as senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, where he oversaw IBM's (AI) Watson platform, portfolio and investments. Under his leadership, IBM expanded the specialization of IBM Watson into various industries and domains including health, security, analytics, Internet of Things (IOT), and financial services. He was also responsible for IBM Research and the company’s Intellectual Property.

Prior to this, beginning in July 2007, Dr. Kelly served as senior vice president and director of IBM Research - only the tenth person to hold that position over the past seven decades. Under Dr. Kelly, IBM Research expanded its global footprint by adding four new labs (including IBM’s first in Africa, South America and Australia), creating a network of approximately 3,000 scientists and technical employees across 12 laboratories in 10 countries.

Most notably, Dr. Kelly and his team were responsible for advancing the science of AI and cognitive computing through his support for Watson, the groundbreaking system that defeated two standing Jeopardy! world champions in 2011. This demonstration awoke the world to the potential of AI.

Dr. Kelly joined IBM in 1980. Between 1980 and 2007, he held numerous management and technical positions related to the development and manufacturing of IBM’s advanced semiconductor technologies. In 1990, he was named director of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

Between 1994 and 2000, Dr. Kelly held several VP and GM positions across IBM’s businesses.

In 2000, Dr. Kelly was named senior vice president and group executive for IBM’s Technology Group, where he was responsible for developing, manufacturing and marketing IBM’s microelectronics and storage technologies, products and services. He later assumed the position of senior vice president of Technology and Intellectual Property, responsible for IBM’s technical and innovation strategies.

Dr. Kelly received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Union College in 1976. He received a Master of Science degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1978 and his Doctorate in materials engineering from RPI in 1980. He has also received three honorary Doctoral degrees.

Dr. Kelly is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a member of the Board and former Chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association. He also is a member of the Boards of Trustees for Union College and RPI.

Dr. Kelly has received numerous technical and business leadership awards, including the Semiconductor Industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. He has been recognized with the IEEE’s top award for R&D management, the Frederik Philips Award, as well as the IEEE’s own Robert N. Noyce Award.

In October 2013, he received the National Academy of Engineering’s Arthur M. Bueche Award for his leadership in driving U.S. semiconductor technology excellence through broad government, university, and corporate collaboration. Most recently, he received RPI's Lifetime Achievement Award.

He has published numerous technical papers and the book Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing.

2021 Moderators

Heather Caruso joined UCLA Anderson in 2018 as assistant dean for equity, diversity and inclusion. A scholar and researcher of organizational behavior, she teaches in the Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making areas.

Caruso’s passion for facilitating collaborative success runs deep in her life and work. “My formal interests in organizational and social psychology developed when I was an undergraduate at Stanford doing cross-cultural negotiation research with Jared Curhan and Lee Ross,” she says. These interests deepened during her years as an engineer and executive in a multinational Silicon Valley startup. “I was fascinated with the real-world experiences stemming from differences in cultural identity. Interpersonal problems could derail even the most talented individual performers, and effective collaboration skills could not only prevent such problems, but raise individual contributions to new heights.”

Layering rigorous academic training on top of practical experience, Caruso grounds her interests in the areas of: effective collaboration (especially for cross-functional and multicultural teams); skilled improvisation in leadership; management of identity, power and influence; and strategies for optimal choice, judgment and decision making. She focused on these topics in over a decade of teaching, research administration and scholarship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and has moved to UCLA Anderson to enrich and expand her work.

“Propelled by our outstanding research in these areas, we are connecting to pioneers and pathbreakers, building bridges between research and practice to best accelerate innovation in the digital age.”

Caruso stays connected to the everyday priorities and challenges of the workplace by consulting for private- and public-sector organization leaders across the globe, as well as by teaching classes in leadership, team dynamics and power and influence. In addition, Caruso partnered with Chicago’s Second City to co-found the Second Science Project, which offers skill-building leadership workshops at the intersection of robust behavioral research and professional improvisational practice.

Caruso is a strong proponent of lifelong learning for management excellence, and encourages students to make the most of their professors’ knowledge, not only while they are pursuing their degrees, but also throughout their careers. “As a preeminent public university, UCLA has a a distinctive opportunity to advance equity, diversity and inclusion,” she says. “It is an honor to help UCLA Anderson seize that opportunity by creating the kind of challenging and rewarding educational climate that can benefit leaders from every walk of life.”

A graduate of UCLA (B.A., '82) and Harvard Business School, Terry Kramer has extensive technology and leadership expertise in the domestic and international telecommunications industry. Since beginning his career at Harris Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton, Kramer has held executive roles in AirTouch, PacTel and Vodafone globally. At Vodafone, he was the group strategy officer, group HR officer and chief of staff. He was also regional president of Vodafone Americas, with responsibilities for oversight of Vodafone's 45% interest in Verizon Wireless and Vodafone's venture capital activities. He also served on the Executive Committee at Vodafone Group Plc.

During his tenure at Vodafone, he and his family moved no fewer than eight times to locations that included London, The Hague, Dallas, Phoenix and San Francisco. The benefit: "Living in so many different places, working in so many fundamentally different environments gave me a new appreciation of contextual leadership - how leaders must be adept at assessing the different context of each leadership role to ensure a dynamic nature to their style, achieving success for that unique environment."

While serving as an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School between 2011 and 2013, Kramer was appointed by President Obama to serve as Ambassador, Head of U.S. Delegation for the World Conference on International Telecommunications in June 2012. This delegation formulated and communicated the U.S. policy regarding the criticality of a free and open internet as well as an inclusive, multistakeholder governance, the need to proactively address cybersecurity threats and the need for liberalized, open markets that encourage global accelerated broadband access. The conference was covered by CNBC, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

No stranger to the field of academia (his parents were teachers), Kramer jumped at the opportunity to work at UCLA Anderson, as it provided "a chance to engage with the next generation of leaders." An adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson since 2013, Kramer is a full-time faculty member, teaching the foundational technology management course, covering the impact of disruptive innovation on products, services, markets and competition, and another course on the evolution and innovation in the mobile communications industry and promising areas of innovation. He is also a faculty advisor in the Global Access Program and Strategic Management Research program. Kramer serves on the boards of TeleSign and TangoCard and on the advisory boards of RapidSOS and Textpert, as well as the Harvard Business School California Research Center, UCLA Economics Department board of visitors and Larkin Street Youth Services.

Originally from San Carlos, California, Kramer and his wife, Suzan, currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, from which he commutes to Los Angeles regularly. Together they have developed a family foundation focused on education, health and human services, which "reflects our views about the impact of youth and education on our collective future."

Olav Sorenson joined the UCLA Anderson faculty in 2020. His primary stream of research pertains to economic geography, focusing on how entrepreneurship influences the growth and competitiveness of regions within countries, and on why some regions appear more supportive to entrepreneurs than others. “I was in graduate school in the mid-1990s at Stanford, in Silicon Valley, and it seemed like everybody and their brother was getting involved in a startup,” Sorenson says. “That’s really what got me interested in entrepreneurship and interested in ‘Why Silicon Valley?’ What was different about Silicon Valley than other places?”

He has called attention to unexpected consequences of the fact that social capital plays an important role in entrepreneurial success. Largely in recognition of this research, Sorenson received the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.

His secondary streams of research have addressed the relationships between basic science and innovation and how organizations can better learn from their interactions with customers and from their manufacturing experience.

In total, he has delivered nearly 400 research presentations and has had more than 90 papers published on these subjects, in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal and Research Policy. Sorenson serves as a department editor for Management Science and as a deputy editor at the American Sociological Review. He has also served in editorial positions at more than a dozen other journals.

Sorenson’s Venture Capital Strategy course is a version of one he’s taught since 2005. “My goal with that course is to do something that’s a little different from the typical venture capital course, which is usually about valuation and contract terms,” says Sorenson. “This course comes more from the perspective of someone who would be an active venture capital or angel investor, and some of the types of strategic decisions that are involved with that.” He’ll also be teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Initiation, an introductory entrepreneurship course.

In addition to his research and teaching responsibilities, Sorenson joins the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation as faculty research director. In that role, he plans to build on the curricular offerings of the Price Center and create a research arm dedicated to entrepreneurial studies. Sorenson also plans to mentor student entrepreneurial teams within the Anderson Venture Accelerator and those participating in the school’s Business Creation Option field study.

From 1999 to 2005, Sorenson taught strategy courses at UCLA Anderson. Prior to returning to Anderson, he held the Frederick Frank ’54 and Mary C. Tanner Professorship at the Yale School of Management and, before that, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto. He has also served on the faculties of London Business School and the University of Chicago, and has held visiting appointments at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, SDA Bocconi, Universidad Carlos III, Melbourne Business School, Singapore Management University, the National University of Singapore, BI Norwegian Business School, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and INSEAD.

Sorenson received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University.

2021 Schedule

Thursday, October 28 (Remote)

5:00 - 5:10 p.m.	Welcome
	Terry Kramer (UCLA '82), Faculty Director, Easton Technology Management Center; Adjunct Professor in DOTM, UCLA Anderson
5:10 - 6:00 p.m.	Fireside Chat: How Technology Innovation Transforms Society and Our Ethics
	Juan Enriquez, Author, Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics; Managing Director, Excel Venture Management Terry Kramer (UCLA '82), Faculty Director, Easton Technology Management Center; Adjunct Professor in DOTM, UCLA Anderson
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.	Virtual Networking

Friday, October 29 (Hybrid)

9:00 - 9:10 a.m.	Welcome
	Terry Kramer (UCLA '82), Faculty Director, Easton Technology Management Center; Adjunct Professor in DOTM, UCLA Anderson
9:10 - 10:00 a.m.	Fireside Chat: AI for Good
	John Kelly III, Executive Vice President Cognitive Solutions & IBM Research, IBM (Retired) Heather Caruso, Assistant Dean, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; Adjunct Assistant Professor in Management & Organizations, UCLA Anderson
10:00 - 11:00 a.m.	Panel 1: Global Tech Innovation
	Zenia Tata, Chief Impact Officer, X Prize Mareme Dieng, Lead, Global Innovation Strategy, 500 Startups Moderator: Olav Sorensen, Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies; Professor of Strategy; Faculty Research Director, Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, UCLA Anderson
11:00 - 11:10 a.m.	Break
11:10 - 12:00 p.m.	Panel 2: GreenTech
	Laura Beane, President, Vestas Kameale Terry, Co-Founder & CEO, ChargerHelp! Michael Webber, Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources, University of Texas at Austin; CTO, Energy Impact Partners Moderator: Cassie Rauser, Executive Director, Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, UCLA
12:00 - 12:10 p.m.	Closing
12:10 - 1:00 p.m.	Lunch & Virtual Networking

2020 Highlights

Contact

Darina Genina, Program Manager
darina.genina@anderson.ucla.edu