Researchers from MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics have developed a portable desalinator that can turn seawater into safe drinking water, reports Ian Mount for Fortune. Research scientist Jongyoon Han and graduate student Bruce Crawford have created Nona Technologies to commercialize the product, writes Mount.
Prof. Emeritus Stuart Madnick and Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, write for The Wall Street Journal about the seven actions that corporate leaders can take to ensure that employees contribute to maintaining a secure organization. “New vulnerabilities emerge every day, as malicious cybersecurity actors find fresh ways to attack or infiltrate organizations. Technology can help, but it can only do so much,” write Madnick and Pearlson. “Just as important is a culture where all employees fill in the gaps—by noticing anomalies, questioning things that might look legitimate but are slightly off in some way, or stopping compromised processes that would otherwise proceed.”
Prof. Thomas Kochan writes for Fortune about how California’s new Fast Food Council can positively impact businesses, investors, employers, and workers. The council is “composed of industry, worker, and government representative to set minimum wage, safety, and employment and training standards for workers in large fast food chains and their franchises,” writes Kochan.
Writing for WBUR, Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan and Wilma Liebman, former chair of the National Labor Relations Board, explore the current rise in worker activism and how to rebalance the relationship between employees and management. “The challenge, as ever, is to translate successful organizing campaigns into successful negotiations, resulting in labor agreements that provide ongoing representation for workers,” they write.
David HC Correll, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, writes for The Hill about how environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria impacts global supply chain managers and their sustainability efforts. “From 2020 to 2021, we observed that investors were by far the fastest-growing driver of sustainability pressure on firms,” writes Correll. “At the same, the understanding of what exactly ESG and supply chain sustainability entails changes depending on the geography, industry and year that we ask.”
Prof. Hari Balakrishnan speaks with Forbes contributor Stuart Anderson about his decision to leave India to pursue a PhD in computer science in the U.S., his love for teaching students as a professor at MIT and his work co-founding Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a software company that utilizes technology to make roads safer. “Immigration and immigrants make the United States stronger,” said Balakrishnan. “Immigration is the biggest strength that we have. We need to be able to attract and retain talent, no matter where people come from.”
Alumni Mahmoud Ghulman and Aziz Alghunaim co-founded Nash, a platform that allows businesses to select specific delivery providers based on price and availability, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “By removing the technical, logistical, and operational overhead associated with offering a reliable delivery experience, Nash helped hundreds of businesses access new customers and revenue streams,” says Ghulman.
Ifueko Igbinedion PhD ’22, Marlyse Reeves PhD ’22 and Wharton alumni Isoken Igbinedion, and Simone Kendle founded Parfait, a company that uses technology to more efficiently design and create wigs, reports Ron Miller for TechCrunch. “The four women have built a solution that lets women simply choose a wig and answer a series of questions to come up with the final design,” explains Miller. “They have mixed this with machine learning to help with sizing and proper tinting, while bringing in human stylists to make the final decisions when needed.”
Francis Plaza ’13 co-founded PayMongo, a fintech firm designed to digitalize the Philippine’s cash-based economy, reports Catherine Wang for Forbes. “PayMongo now not only plans to expand beyond the Philippines to other Southeast Asian countries, but also to broaden its remit by becoming a platform for scaling small business in the region,” writes Wang.
Alumnus Andrew Lau co-founded Jellyfish, an engineering management software platform designed to assess contextual business data and engineering signals to promote transparency into how engineering organizations work and operate, reports Bruce Rogers for Forbes. “We know leading a large engineering team is hard, not because necessarily of the coding, it's actually the intersection of technology and the business” says Lau.
Lecturer Bill Fischer writes for Forbes after speaking with Prof. Annika Steiber, director of Menlo College’s Silicon Valley RenDanheYi Research Center, about the organizational changes General Electric Appliances (GEA) has made in recent years. “GEA, today, represents what has turned-out to be a successful major organizational turnaround,” writes Fischer.
Prof. Tom Kochan speaks with Inside Intelligence reporter Christina Obolenskaya about the expectations for unionized workplaces and how that will impact retailers. “The most critical thing is to listen and treat the workforce with respect, allowing employees to shape how they come back to work,” says Kochan. “Having a dialogue with the larger team, managers and supervisors need to collaborate on how much flexibility they can provide their employees while still meeting company quotas.”
Keri Pearlson, executive director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan consortium, and Prof. Stuart Madnick write for The Wall Street Journal about how managers should build and equip their organizations for cyber threats. “It is more effective to build a cybersecurity culture – an effort that goes beyond training and gets employees to see security as part of their job,” write Pearlson and Madnick.
Financial Times reporter Jemima Kelly spotlights Prof. Basima Tewfi’s research on imposter syndrome. Tewfik’s study finds that those who have “imposter workplace thoughts” tend to “have an advantage over their colleagues when it comes to social skills, teamwork and the support of others.”
Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speaks with Innovator News reporter Jennifer L. Schenker about his upcoming book, “The Geek Way,” which explores how tech companies found the best way to operate their businesses. “If you want your company to be a tech company, then you will be competing against geeks,” says McAfee. “These are people who look at things differently, go deep on a problem, get obsessed with it and fiercely work at it until they think they find a good solution.”