Data Made to Matter by MIT Sloan School of Management Data Made to Matter

The Second Machine Age is here. Two MIT economists create a playbook for how businesses can adapt to our new digital future.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee are co-founders the Initiative on the Digital Economy at MIT Sloan. Their new book is “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.”

We speak with Erik and Andy about the great economic rebalancing of minds and machines, physical products and virtual platforms, core competencies and the wisdom of the crowd.

A supply chain expert shows that happy, motivated workers can make big profits for big box companies - that the service and retail industries can provide well-paying jobs, compete on costs, and win. We speak with Zeynep Ton, Professor of Operations Management at MIT Sloan, author of "The Good Jobs Strategy" and founder of the Good Jobs Institute, about how good jobs can be great for business, and what it means for the future of work.

MIT Sloan professor Pierre Azoulay is turning the scientific method back on science. He uses online data from individual scientists and institutions to track research and innovation, and he's finding significant long-term returns on investment for the public funding of science. We speak with Pierre about superstar scientists, the research-to-patent pipeline, and why funding science matters.

A social psychologist uses data to reframe the conversations around race in corporate America. We speak with Evan Apfelbaum about how we talk about diversity, gender, and race in the workplace, and how it affects whether people stay or leave.

Big data is flooding the business world. And we need a new generation of business analysts to make sense of it. A report from McKinsey predicts that the US workforce will be short 1.5 million big data managers and analysts by 2018. MIT Sloan is rising to the challenge with a new Master of Business Analytics Program, launched in 2016.

We speak with Dimitris Bertsimas, Professor of Management, and Director of the new MBAn program at MIT Sloan.Plus, we speak with MIT Sloan alum Ali Almossawi. His business school experience set him on a career path in data visualization; he now works for Apple. His new book, “Bad Choices,” explains computer algorithms to a wide audience.

Antoinette Schoar is using big data to hold the personal finance industry accountable to the people it serves. The finance professor was a founding member of the Consumer Advisory Board for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We speak with Antoinette about prolific credit card offers, shoddy financial advisors, and how what’s good for the consumer can also be good for the market.