Smart Customization Seminar 2012

DATE: December 3-4, 2012

LOCATION: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA

SEMINAR TITLE: Micro|Macro|Customization: From Custom Genes to the Personalized City - Emerging Strategies and Technologies for the Personal Economy

REGISTRATION IS ONLINE IS CLOSED!  

REGISTRATION IS AVAILABLE ONSITE MONDAY NIGHT OR TUESDAY MORNING!

Download Seminar Agenda

	B. Joseph Pine II, Strategic Horizons, LLP Internationally acclaimed author, speaker and management adivser. A visiting Scholar with the Design Lab at MIT, he co-founded Strategic Horizons LLP to help businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.
	Alex "Sandy" Pentland, MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group Professor Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Pentland's research focus is on harnessing information flows and incentives within social networks, the big data revolution, and converting this technology into real-world ventures.
	Marco Mattiacci, President and CEO, Ferrari North America Marco Mattiacci was appointed Chief Executive Office of Ferrari North America, Inc. in January 2010. He oversees the largest market of Ferrari, which beyond the US included Canada and all Central and South America.
	Anthony Flynn, Entrepreneur and Author After graduating from the University of Southern California with a business degree in 2006, Anthony Flynn founded YouBar, the world’s first customized nutrition bar company, with his mother, Ava Bise. Author of New York Times Bestseller, Custom Nation: Why Customization Is the Future of Business and How to Profit From It.
	Emily Vencat, Entrepreneur and Author After studying English Literature at Columbia University in New York and at Oxford University in England, Emily Flynn Vencat moved to London in 2002, where she began her journalistic career at Newsweek Magazine. Author of New York Times Bestseller, Custom Nation: Why Customization Is the Future of Business and How to Profit From It.

The seminar's foremost idea is to connect CEOs, new business developers, consultants, corporate entrepreneurs, innovators, the investment community, and leading researchers from MIT and other leading institutions in peer-to-peer interactions to foster intense discussions and to co-create an agenda for the Personal Economy.

Conventionally, mass customization has been seen as the efficient creation of products and services to meet the demands of each individual customer. But this still emerging development on the micro level – the level of the individual firm-customer relationship – has recently been supplemented by a strong application of customization and personalization principles on the macro level. Enabled by new methods of imaging and analytic testing, personalized medicine is replacing the blockbuster approach that has dominated the health industry.  Anonymous cities with mass scale infrastructures are becoming personal by real-time data apps, personal mobility, and the stronger participation of citizens in the planning process. Mass production is being supplemented by a distributed and local infrastructure of digital manufacturing and open hardware.

These and other applications are strong drivers of disruptive innovation and value creation in many industries. We are at the advent of the Personal Economy that changes the dominant logic of business from a mass society characterized by homogeneous customer segments and mass production of products and services towards a value system that creates profit opportunities from the reality that all people are different.

The 2012 agenda will present divergent and complementary voices along four of the core areas where personalization today is shaping our economy and society most:

(1) Consumables, (2) Health Care and Medicine, (3) Urban Living and the City, and (4) The New Production System based on digital technologies and easy access to hardware and big data.