Babson’s Marty Anderson Named Favorite Professor of Top MBAs by Poets & Quants
Babson College senior lecturer in the Technology, Operation and Innovation Management division Marty Anderson has been named one of the Favorites Professors of Top MBAs by Poets and Quants.
Ross Chesnick, 2017 Poets & Quants Best and Brightest MBAs, says about Anderson:
“Marty Anderson, a part-time Babson faculty member and independent consultant, had one mission when he taught: to turn the classroom experience onto its head. While most of academia subscribes to case studies and lectures as their pedagogical agent, Marty deviated and centered his curriculum around “living case studies,” which were aggregations of video clips and photos, most of which he took himself, to amplify our understanding of user-centered experiences, customers and business ecosystems. He entranced his audience of students and pushed them to observe the very subtle details that revealed insights which laid the premise for opportunity and innovation. In parallel, he also believed in the concept of “social pull,” which is a business’s ability to leverage social impact as an opportunity to reign in customers and emerging revenue channels. He wasn’t the most empathetic teacher, nor was he the most stubborn; instead, he encompassed the traits of a deity that all business leaders should replicate: know your customer, know your ecosystem, create social value.”
Marty Anderson
Anderson is a practitioner faculty whose area of expertise is on complex networked industries and organizations of all kinds. His role is identifying new venture or innovation opportunities. He spent 20 years as a senior lecturer at Babson, and serves as the Lewis Family Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Social Innovation.
He travels the world documenting technologies that are rapidly changing networked human behavior at many levels.
Anderson has 30 years of international commercial and research experience in more than 40 nations. Before Babson he worked on large scale corporate turn-arounds that involved realigning entire demand and supply chains, and global sponsored research programs at MIT. Since coming to Babson he has done similar work in executive education and consulting on all continents.
For 10 years he watched first hand as more than six billion mobile devices were deployed in all areas of the world, and has been tracking how this network is changing global human systems in: media, education, communication, health care, and in basic infrastructure (water, energy, food, housing).
Anderson travels these ecosystems with colleagues capturing changes and opportunities on video, which is then assembled into “living cases” that seek to “bring the action” to people who cannot travel to it. He and colleagues are experimenting with VR to enhance this.
Recently he worked with the Lancet Commission on Global surgery to help document the deployment of laparoscopic surgery in Mongolia.
He is currently working on projects involving global healthcare, genomic innovations in water and waste, the conversion of electric grids to solar/wind, wearables, the infrastructure required for autonomous vehicles, and “the internet of things” that seeks to link all these together.