MIT Hosts Hackathon for Management Students
Students
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management will compete in
the inaugural
Management Practice Hackathon this week.
Students
in the management school's enterprise
management (EM) track will vie to come up with the best
solution to a challenge
proposed to them involving the digital transformation taking place in
the
supply chain logistics industry. As a consequence of a collaboration
with the
MIT Media Lab and industry sponsor SAP,
students will sit in on a series of
design workshops led by executives from Caterpillar, UPS, CloudDDM and
Stratasys.
"By
posing a complex business challenge in an
emergent domain, the hackathon is a great venue to reinforce the EM
track
vision to prepare students to be future leaders through adopting a
holistic,
cross-functional approach to problem solving," said Sharmila C.
Chatterjee,
academic head of the EM track.
They
will then work on solutions to a given
challenge incorporating the Internet of Things, 3D printing and
blockchain
technology. At the conclusion of the hackathon, student teams will
present
their solutions to a panel of MIT and industry judges.
The
EM track at the Sloan management school is
intended as a project-based curriculum designed to help students learn
to take
a holistic approach to problem solving across multiple functional
domains, such
as marketing, operations and strategy.
"The
combination of business and technology
expertise the students experience in that program ideally prepares them
to
become successful leaders in the digital economy," said Bernd Weiz,
executive
vice president at SAP.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.