Dr. Bruce Cameron is director of the System Architecture Lab at MIT and co-founder of the consulting firm Technology Strategy Partners. His areas of research include technology strategy, system architecture and product platform management. Previously, Dr. Cameron led the “MIT Commonality”, a research study of 30 companies on platform performance, which concluded that companies face systemic pressure on homogeneity, in part, as a result of problems in determining costs. Dr. Cameron has supervised more than 50 graduate students and conducted research projects for Amazon, BP, Sikorsky, Nokia, Caterpillar, AMGEN, Verizon and NASA.

Dr. Cameron teaches the subject of System Architecture for the “System Design and Management”, where he has trained over 500 students. Dr. Cameron´s teaching at Sloan Executive Education has been rated as the highest level of Executive Education program at MIT for several years. In addition, he is the Faculty Director of MIT´s online certificate “Architecture and System Engineering”, which has trained more than 5,300 participants.

Jessika Trancik is a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research examines the impacts of technologies and the reasons behind technological change. She has developed theory and predictive models to understand why some technologies improve faster than others, and what technology features enable rapid innovation. Trancik has developed models for forecasting technological change, which inform engineering design, public policy, and investment portfolios. Several of her theories and models have been applied to new and developing energy technologies, such as solar energy and batteries, and to electricity and transportation systems. Her models have also been used to inform government innovation policy, and applied in diverse industries, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, software, and consumer products. Her work has been published in journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, and Environmental Science and Technology, and has been featured by news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and NPR.

Three blurbs:

• Professor Trancik received her B.S. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
• She has developed theory and predictive models to understand why some technologies improve faster than others, and what technology features enable rapid innovation.
• Her models have also been used to inform government innovation policy, and applied in diverse industries, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, software, and consumer products.

Olivier de Weck was born in Switzerland and has a degree in industrial engineering from the ETH Zurich and in aerospace systems engineering from MIT. Prior to joining MIT, he was an engineering liaison and later director of the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 aircraft engineering program.

Professor De Weck is a leader in systems engineering research. He focuses on the design of complex man-made systems, such as aircraft, spacecraft, cars, printers and critical infrastructure, and on their evolution. His main focus is on strategic properties that have the potential to maximize life cycle value. Since 2001, his group has developed new methods and quantitative tools that explicitly consider production, flexibility, common features and sustainability, among other characteristics. Professor De Weck’s teaching emphasizes excellence, innovation, and the combination of theory and practice.

PROGRAMS: Designing Product Families