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Program Overview
Embark on a transformative journey with “Frontiers in Digital Innovation: AI, Future of Tech & Data Science,” an exclusive collaboration between Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and Columbia Engineering. This program is a cornerstone of the Global Unicorn Program, dedicated to nurturing a new wave of unicorn companies with a renewed emphasis on social purpose, global responsibility, and sustainable value creation.
This program offers you the opportunity to master AI algorithms and data analytics, navigate future technology landscapes, and embrace cross-cultural perspectives. You’ll gain insights from industry experts and collaborate with entrepreneurs from both the East and West. By participating in this program, you will emerge as a visionary leader with the ability to strategically integrate innovation, shape industries, and drive growth in an increasingly digital-centric world. Elevate your career and organization to new heights by joining this immersive program that will reshape your understanding of digital innovation.
Program Highlights:
Strategic Digital Mastery: Learn how to develop and implement digital strategies that align seamlessly with your organization’s vision and objectives.
Data-Driven Decision-Making: Harness the power of data analytics to transform raw data into actionable insights that drive innovation and fuel growth.
Hands-on Corporate Insights: Benefit from real-world exposure to leading tech companies, learning from their challenges, triumphs, and best practices in the realm of digital innovation.
Leadership in the Digital Age: Hone your leadership skills to effectively manage teams and projects in a digital-first environment, fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability within your organization.
Networking with Global Executives: Forge valuable connections with a community of global leaders, opening doors for future cross-border collaborations and partnerships.
Understanding the Innovation Ecosystem: Delve into the mechanics of digital ecosystems, learning how to create, nurture, and leverage them for sustained business growth.
Future-Proof Your Organization: Equip yourself with the tools and knowledge to anticipate future digital trends, ensuring your organization remains at the forefront of the digital revolution.
Who Should Attend:
- Board members and C-suite executives poised to redefine their organization’s digital trajectory.
- Senior leaders who envision a seamless integration of digital strategies into traditional business models.
- Executives aspiring to high-ranking roles such as CEO, CSO, CTO, CDO, CIO, etc.
- Pioneers who are not just participants but architects of the digital future.
Past Program Participants:
- Typical profiles include: founder & CEO, strategic advisor, VP of open innovation & venturing, head of strategy, head of digital innovation, VP of engineering, sales operations director, solution architecture director, supply chain business partner, chief technology officer, COO, VP.
- Typical industries include: retail & consumer goods, finance & insurance, energy, entertainment & media, fashion & beauty, information technology, manufacturing, agrochemicals, engineering, services, health care, manufacturing, logistics & supply chain.
Application Information
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Location
Columbia University
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Date
May 2024
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Program Fee
$9,800 USD
Includes tuition, cases, materials, site visits, breakfast & lunch and closing dinner.
CKGSB and Columbia Alumni - Receive up to 20% off the program fee (talk to our regional representative, found on the back cover of this brochure to apply).
Key Focus Areas
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- Emerging trends in digital innovation
- Advanced AI techniques and application mastery
- Strategy for navigating the evolving tech landscape
- Data-driven finance and investment strategies
- Career advancement strategies and organizational growth
- Diverse global perspectives and cross-cultural insights
- Industry-leading best practices through company visits
- Cross-continental entrepreneurial networking
- AI, marketing, and product design
CKGSB Faculty Highlights
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Bing XIANGFounding Dean, Professor of China Business and Globalization, CKGSBDr. Xiang is a leading authority on China business. His insights on the innovations in China, globalization of Chinese companies, China’s development models, global implications of China’s transformation and economic disruption have been widely acclaimed. He serves as an independent board member of several companies (including three Fortune Global 500 companies) listed in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the United States.
Dr. Xiang’s research interests include the reform of state-owned enterprises, innovation, and the role of the private sector in China, and economic disruptions. He is a leading authority on China business, innovations in China, globalization of Chinese companies, China’s development models, global implications of China’s transformation, social innovation, economic disruptions, China-US relations, global trade and investment systems and global governance. His writings and cases on these subjects are considered among the most influential in China and beyond. -
Hong CHENAssociate Dean for Americas, Professor of Management Science, and Director of Research Center for Clean Energy and Carbon Neutral Development, CKGSBDr. Hong Chen is Professor of Management Science at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB). He is one of the founding faculty members of CKGSB and the director of the Clean Energy and Carbon Neutral Development Research Center. Prior to joining CKGSB, he held the positions of Alumni Professor of Supply Chain Management at the University of British Colombia Sauder School of Business, and Professor of Management Science at Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. In recent years, his research has focused on clean energy and carbon neutral development, particularly in the fields of investment, technology, and market opportunities in the entire hydrogen value chain. Dr. Hong Chen received his PhD from Stanford University. -
Baohong SUNDean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing, CKGSBProfessor Sun Baohong also directs CKGSB’s Customer Information Management Center. Prior to joining CKGSB in 2011, Professor Sun was Carnegie Bosch Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Sun received her PhD from the University of Southern California in 1997 and BA from Renmin University of China. Her research focuses on rational and strategic consumer choices and dynamic structural models; dynamic and interactive marketing mix and customer information management; and, most recently, on modeling dynamic and inter-dependent consumer decisions on e-commerce and social media platforms. Professor Sun is the recipient of numerous awards for research and teaching, including the 2008 Finalist for John D.C. Little Best Paper Award at INFORMS, the 2006 MBA George Leland Bach Teaching Award, and the 2005 CART Research Frontier Award for Innovative Research at Carnegie Mellon University.
She also serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Journal of Marketing. Her extensive consulting experience includes work with major corporations including Bosch, Boy Scouts of America, Highmark Insurance, John Deer and IBM. An active contributor to media discussions on current business issues, Professor Sun’s research has been cited in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Bloomberg, among others.
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Tianshu SUNVisiting Professor of Information Systems, Director of the Center for Digital Transformation, CKGSBTianshu's research is focused on digital transformation, digital technology, digital platform, and digital economy. His research conducted in collaboration with leading private and public sector organizations addresses how firms and governments can combine data analytics, field experiment, causal inference, machine learning, and economic models to improve business decisions and industry policies.
Tianshu has worked closely with a variety of organizations including Facebook, Alibaba, and Adobe. Many findings from these studies have been implemented by collaborating organizations. Tianshu has given over 80 talks at top universities (Harvard, MIT, Wharton, Chicago, CMU, NYU, etc.) and international conferences, and has over a dozen research papers published in top journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, QME and Journal of Health Economics. Tianshu’s research has received 16 Best Paper Awards (ICIS, CIST, WITS, INFORMS), and served as the Associate Editors at ISR, Management Science and MISQ. Tianshu has developed a series of new courses on Digital Transformation, Big Data Analytics, and Digital Platforms and was honored with USC Golden Apple Award (for Best Professors).
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Jianwen (Jon) LiaoProfessor of Managerial Practice, Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, CKGSB, Executive Fellow, Harvard Business School, and Senior Advisor to the Chairman, JD GroupDr. Liao has an extensive global career with 25 years of experience in strategy and leadership roles in both academia and industry. In addition to his role at CKGSB, Dr. Liao serves as Senior Advisor to the Chairman at JD Group and an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School. He served as Chief Strategy Officer of JD.com from April 2017 to July 2021, and played a key role in reshaping JD's mission and strategic positioning, pivoting it into a technology and service enterprise with a central focus on the supply chain. He also spearheaded key investments in companies like VIPS, Google, Farfetch, Li & Fung, FiveStar (formerly Best Buy of China).
Dr. Liao is well-known for his cross-disciplinary research in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. His academic experience extends across the United States and Asia, including tenured professorships at the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology and visiting professorship positions at institutions such as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, and China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).
He has also served on the boards of several companies, including Farfetch, Qihoo 360, China Merchant Real Estate, China Unicom, and Yonghui, Bairong. Dr. Liao is frequently invited to advise leading Chinese companies and MNCs on building innovative organizations and designing strategic initiatives for sustainable growth. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is regularly quoted in business publications worldwide.
Columbia University Faculty Highlights
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David YaoThe Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science Piyasombatkul Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations ResearchDavid Yao is the Piyasombatkul Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he has been co-chairing the Financial and Business Analytics Center at Columbia Data Science Institute, and the Columbia Fintech, AI and Business Analytics (FABULYS) Initiative. More recently, he has been the co-director of the AI-Fintech Lab located in Science Park, Hong Kong, a collaborative project between Columbia and CityU/HK.
His research and teaching interests are in applied probability and stochastic systems, focusing on resource control and risk management issues. Some of his recent works include modeling and mechanism design in decentralized consensus protocols (e.g., blockchains), systemic risk in supply-demand networks, carbon emission and ETS (emission trading system). He is an IEEE Fellow, an INFORMS Fellow, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
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Emanuel DermanProfessor of Professional Practice and Director, and the Professor of the Master of Financial Engineering ProgramEmanuel Dermanis a professor at Columbia University, where he directs their program in financial engineering. His latest book is The Volatility Smile, a textbook on modern options theory. He is also the author of Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disasters, On Wall Street and in Life; it was one of Business Week’s top ten books of 2011, also published in German by Hoffman und Campe in Oct. 2013. His previous book, My Life As A Quant, was also one of Business Week's top ten of 2004, in which he introduced the quant world to a very wide audience.
Derman was born in South Africa but has lived most of his professional life in Manhattan, where he has made contributions to several fields. He started out as a theoretical physicist, doing research on unified theories of elementary particle interactions. At AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1980she developed programming languages for business modeling. From 1985 to 2002 he worked on Wall Street, running quantitative strategies research groups in fixed income, equities, and risk management, and was appointed managing director at Goldman Sachs & Co. in 1997. The financial models he developed there, the Black-Derman-Toy interest rate model and the Derman-Kani local volatility model, have become widely used industry standards. In his 1996 article “Model Risk” Derman pointed out the dangers that inevitably accompany the use of models, a theme he developed in My Life as a Quant. Among his awards and honors, he was named the SunGard/IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year in 2000. He has a PhD in theoretical physics from Columbia University and is the author of numerous articles in elementary particle physics, computer science, and finance.
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Garud IyengarSenior Vice Dean of Research and Academic ProgramsGarud Iyengar’s research is focused on understanding uncertain systems and exploiting available information using data- driven control and optimization algorithms. He and his students have explored applications in many diverse fields, such as machine learning, systemic risk, asset management, operations management, sports analytics, and biology. Iyengar’s research group is currently working on thermodynamics of sensing and memory in cells, an automatic defensive assignment and event detection in NBA games, a deep neural-network-based framework for interpretable robust decision making, attribution schemes for allocating payment in a multi-channel advertising, systemic risk associated with extreme weather, and an NLP-based model for predicting stock performance using news reports. Iyengar received a B Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1993 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. He is a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. -
Sheena S. IyengarInaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division, Columbia Business SchoolSheena S. Iyengar is a renowned authority on choice and decision-making, Her influential book "The Art of Choosing" Choosing" received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. She has made notable appearances on television, including the Today Show, the Daily Show, and Fareed Zakaria's GPS, and her TED Talks have garnered nearly four million views. Dr. Iyengar holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University.
She has earned numerous accolades, including the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002 and being named a member of the Thinkers50 in 2011 and 2019. Dr. Iyengar is a respected educator, having received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School in 2012 and recognition as one of the World’s Best B-School Professors by Poets and Quants. She has shared her expertise with leading organizations like Deloitte, Google, and J.P. Morgan & Chase. In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Iyengar is known for her "Think Bigger" course, which combines neuroscience and cognitive science to unlock creative potential. She is also the leader of the Innovation Salon, facilitating discussions on industry challenges and innovative solutions among students, alumni, faculty, and Innovation Fellows.
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Zhou YuProfessor Yu is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department, Columbia University.Zhou Yu designs algorithms for real-time intelligent interactive systems that coordinate with user actions that are beyond spoken languages, including non-verbal behaviors to achieve effective and natural communications. In particular, she optimizes human-machine communication via studies of multimodal sensing and analysis, speech and natural language processing, machine learning and human-computer interaction. The central focus of her research is to bring together all the areas above to design, implement and deploy end-to-end real-time interactive intelligent systems that can plan globally considering interaction history and current user actions to achieve better user experience and task performance. She enjoys collaborating with researchers with different backgrounds on interdisciplinary research in all areas of science, such as healthcare, education, and robotics. Yu joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2021. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at UC Davis. She received her PhD at the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2017. -
Harry WestProfessor of Practice in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations ResearchProf. Harry West Professor West is a professional practice in the department of industrial engineering and operation research. He's the driving force behind Columbia's innovative curriculum, focusing on design, data, and behavior change to reduce consumption. As the Principal of Invisible Design, he tackles complex business challenges and guides organizations to align their design work with strategic goals. Harry's impressive background includes being the former CEO of frog, Senior Partner at Prophet, and CEO at Continuum. He's had a hand in creating groundbreaking products like Swiffer and ThermaCare for P&G and reimagining interactions in financial services with BBVA and Fidelity. His extensive global experience spans numerous companies, from American Express to BMW, with a track record of billion-dollar product and service designs. Before his design consulting career, he taught engineering at MIT, holding a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution, and holds a deep academic background with degrees from Cambridge University and MIT. -
Xunyu ZhouLiu Family Professor of Financial Engineering, Director of the Financial Engineering Program, and the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations ResearchHis research focuses on quantitative behavioral finance models that incorporate human emotions and psychology into financial decision making, and on intelligent wealth management solutions using optimal control and machine learning techniques. Zhou is well known for his work in indefinite stochastic LQ control theory and application to dynamic mean-variance portfolio selection, in asset allocation and pricing under cumulative prospect theory, and in general time inconsistent problems. He directs the FDT Center for Intelligent Asset Management, a research center funded by a FinTech company. He has addressed the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians and has been awarded the Wolfson Research Award from The Royal Society (UK), the Outstanding Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Humboldt Distinguished Lecturer, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. He is both an IEEE Fellow and a SIAM Fellow. Zhou received his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Control Theory from Fudan University in China in 1989. He was the Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and the Director of Nomura Center for Mathematical Finance at University of Oxford during 2007-2016 before joining Columbia.
About the Organizers
CKGSB
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) is China’s first privately-funded, research-intensive and not-for- profit business school. The school aims to cultivate transformative business leaders with a global vision, sense of social responsibility, innovative mindset, and ability to lead with empathy and compassion. Today, CKGSB stands apart for its 46 full-time, world-class faculty, more than half of whom previously held tenure or senior professorships at top business schools. CKGSB’s alumni also represent the best and brightest in Greater China and wider region. In fact, more than half of CKGSB’s 20,000 alumni are at the CEO or Chairman level and, collectively, they lead one fifth of China’s 100 most valuable brands. CKGSB has so far nurtured 136 unicorn companies. It has a vision of developing a global ecosystem that fosters a new generation of economic disruptors with an enhanced emphasis on global responsibility, social purpose and long-term vision. More than 4000 global executives have participated in CKGSB’s English-language Executive Education programs since 2009.
Columbia Engineering
Since 1864, the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University has been a resource to the world for major advances in human progress. Today, Columbia Engineering is a global leader in engineering education, research, and impact. Located in the heart of New York City, the school convenes more than 250 faculty members and 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students to push the frontiers of knowledge and solve humanity’s most pressing problems.
As impassioned problem solvers and prolific innovators, Columbia Engineering is united in its drive to combine deep knowledge with directed action to impact human progress. The school is not only a source of innovation but also a catalyst for entrepreneurial collaboration across multiple fields.
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