 Live from the Congress Center in London, England, it's theCUBE at MIT and the Digital Economy, the second machine age. Brought to you by headline sponsor, MIT. Welcome back to London, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE. We're here in London at MIT IDE, the birthplace of the first machine age, but we're talking about the second machine age. Elisa Blackman O'Keefe is here. She's the chair of the alumni board of the Digital Economy Initiative at MIT. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having me. So talk about the alumni board. It's a relatively new initiative. Yeah, it is. What's it all about? When Dean Schmidt-Line arrived in 2007, he was maybe surprised, but at least dismayed part, to find out that there was new alumni board for the MIT Sloan School, and it was a mission of his to make sure that that got set up. And it took some time to put in place all the resources and the infrastructure they needed within the school, and he launched it about a year ago. So we've got a group on now the chair of the board. We have a group of 30 people around the world representing kind of all the different years of graduation, the different programs, all geographies, almost all geographies. We don't have anyone in Africa yet. So the purpose of the board is really to help the school create the strongest and most cohesive global alumni community that we can. And I think one thing that they know from research over the years is that the MIT Sloan Alumni Base feels very proud about having been at the school and what we had the chance to do, the opportunities we had there. But the level of engagement and connection for some people is not as strong as we would like it to be. So for the school, for the dean, and for the faculty and the staff, the students there today, we're hoping to act as a conduit between them and the alumni community, and also to help make sure that this is a way that there's still value created for the whole alumni community, whether that's coming to events, networking with each other, understanding more about what's happening in the school and how individual alumni can take advantage of the learning or the programs that are on offer. And of course there's a philanthropic element, but I think we see it very much as two sides of one coin. If you don't have engagement and a sense of connection and concern and that you care about where the school is going and what it's doing, you won't want to support it philanthropically and the school can't do that without your support. Well, the operative board here is engagement. I'm struck by the international scope of your initiatives here. I guess I didn't ever realize that. You guys had a conference similar to this in Sao Paulo last year, you're in London now. I understand you're going back to the South America next year, and you're based in the UK. So how do you foster that type of engagement with such a distributed global organization? Well, and the conferences that you were talking about at the moment, that's just one piece, right? That's the sort of digital initiative. From the board point of view, we're representing all alumni of the entire Sloan School, so everything to do with the economics and the other elements of what goes on in the school. I think it's a tough thing to do. It's obviously easier in the major metropolitan areas. It's easier where we can have clubs. It's easier where we have masses of alumni who either themselves are kind of a critical size to be able to create programs or can make it feasible to bring the dean or to bring different faculty over. And it's harder to do it in other kind of outlying or more rural areas, but we're trying in all different dimensions. So creating online opportunities, making sure that people have different kinds of communications, that they're aware of what's going on, encouraging people to reach out, really trying to use all the different avenues we can think of, but it's tough. Well, and digital makes it easier. Yeah. With the Cubas here, we're really happy to be here all digital all the time. What other kinds of initiatives do you have going on to get the reach out there, to use digital technologies to promote? Well, I can't even keep up with everything that the school is doing, but there is a new innovation initiative, which is important, and they're setting up innovation centers all around the world. I'm not best placed to tell you more about that in detail, but it's definitely something to pick up with the school. I know, for example, that one of the things that they do is they run programs for entrepreneurs in different regions. They were here a few months ago, I think, with that innovation program where they are training executives in different places, and it's partly alumni connected, but not exclusively, but training entrepreneurs and all the kind of best thinking about what's going on at the school. But I think a sort of central point, it's not directly to your question, but I think it gets at the philosophy that the school has about this, is that it's always been very internationally focused. I mean, one of the reasons I was attracted to Sloan, I was an economist working at the World Bank in the mid-80s, and everyone I really respected, it turns out, had been to MIT, either for economics or for management within the Sloan School. But that focus on the international dimensions of management was always as important as anything you were learning about that was going on in the domestic economy. And so I think there's just a mindset around the faculty and the students that we attract as a school. That means it's sort of a natural to look for both online and offline ways to engage people around the world. What's been the reaction of the alumni base in terms of this specific content, content's fabulous today? Yeah, yeah. For those that are participating in this, what are you hearing from them? What are people saying? And how has it changed since the book first came out? Well, if I start first with kind of general alumni reaction, I think this set of issues is very engaging for our alumni base overall, quite apart from the conference itself. We have a huge number of entrepreneurs still compared to any business school. I was looking, we've just done some alumni research and we have more than 50% of alumni say that they've started their own company. Those numbers kind of fluctuate, but that's a huge number of people. And so I think inevitably a large proportion of that will be something digitally related. And even if it's not their own company that they've founded, they'll be involved in some other way with something digital. It's just part of what runs through kind of everybody's life. And so the set of issues around how do things change? How does this affect the economy? How does it affect our social lives? How does it affect our lives more broadly? Would be a set of issues that the alumni base is interested in. 50% is the number that started their own company? I mean, the latest number we had in a survey that we just got back about 1,000 alumni replied, sorry, 2,000 alumni just under replied. And something around 53% say that they have started their own company. It may not be their exclusive job. No, but okay, but still, that's an astoundingly high number. Did it surprise you? It doesn't, because I think, again, like one of those factors that runs through Sloan, like the international perspective, I think the entrepreneurship sense of, you know, kind of the world is out there, I can make my own destiny. What am I gonna do with it? You're given the tools to understand what's happening around you and expected to kind of go and make something of it. That whole notion of developing principled, innovative managers, I think it creates a different breed. Not to say we don't have some very senior corporate successful individuals over the decades we have, but I'm not sure that that is as appealing for most of the people as doing something more entrepreneurial. So, Eliza, being on the alumni board, I'm wondering if you can tell us when the alumni come to an event like this, are they just looking for a day to make them think and help them do their job better? Is it getting back in touch and networking with people? Is it maybe finding potential people that they could hire for their company or undergrads? What are kind of some of the top things that people take away from you? I think that's a great question because you've given me all the answers. The answer is to some extent all of the above, one of the pieces of information that came back in that survey is that alumni are looking in terms of value from being an alumna, sort of alumna, looking for three things. The first is to be able to attend events either at the school or in places like this and to access knowledge and learning from the school. So, this hits that in space. The second thing is to be able to network with other alumni and that doesn't necessarily mean I'm looking for a job and I want that or I'm looking for cash for my startup. It's not necessarily that transactional. It's about meeting like-minded people. There's something about Sloan students and Sloan graduates. There's kind of an irreverence which I don't think means anti-authority. It just means I'm not gonna take everything on face value. I'm gonna look at it myself. I'm gonna challenge it and maybe bring some humor to it and we like being with other people who think that way. We're missing the old coffee salons and the like where we can just come and debate these so we need events like this or the cube to take back these conversations. We need Paris in the 1900s. And just the third thing was just that they're also looking to understand better what the school is doing today, where it's heading next and what kind of new initiatives are coming out and again this is a perfect way to kind of showcase some of that. So for me this hit all three today. So that's very, we just have time for one more question. What's next for you all and what do you wanna see happen in the next five, 10 years? What's the vision? Well if I give you selfish an answer with my kind of alumni board chair hat on. So we have 22,000 and a bit alumni out there from the school in total. And what I would like to see is that overall people feel as strongly connected in one way or another whatever it means to them to the school over the decades as they did when they first graduated and that they maybe speak up a bit more about it. We tend to be a bit reticent to talk about all the great things that MIT does and is. But I'd like to see us reach out more to each other and to the rest of the world and kind of share that knowledge and make a difference. Well that's what theCUBE's all about so we're happy to help. So Eliza, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure, thanks for having me. All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this is theCUBE. We're live from MIT, IDE in London. We'll be right back.