Professor Gertner will demonstrate how introducing adaptive learning principles can drive innovation and improve institutional performance.
Event Details
Experimentation, learning, adaptation, and selection are the hallmark characteristics of efficient markets – they are the cornerstones of both free market economies and biological evolution. In efficient economic systems, competition and financial incentives combine to drive an adaptive cycle that fosters entrepreneurial creativity and the diffusion of innovation.
However these features are not intrinsic to non-market organizations and systems, including NGOs, law and regulation. Incorporating adaptive features of market economies into the design of these traditionally non-market systems is critical for their long-run success. Yet these institutions are designed without attention to these drivers of dynamic efficiency. Drawing on examples from individual purchasing decisions, corporate strategy, health care policy, NGOs and U.S. regulatory processes, Professor Gertner will demonstrate how introducing adaptive learning principles can drive innovation and improve institutional performance. Attend this session to learn how to approach decision making in a different way, whether on an individual, organizational, or sector-wide level.
Speaker Profiles
Robert Gertner (Speaker)
Deputy Dean for Part-time Programs and Joel F. Gemunder Professor of Strategy and Finance, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Robert Gertner is Deputy Dean for Part-time Programs and Joel F. Gemunder Professor of Strategy and Finance at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also Faculty Co-Director of Chicago Booth's Social Enterprise Initiative. His research focuses on issues in strategic decision-making, corporate finance, organization structure, theory of the firm, and social enterprises. He has published papers in numerous scholarly journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and the Yale Law Journal. He is co-author, with colleagues Douglas Baird and Randy Picker, of Game Theory and the Law. Rob teaches courses in strategic decision-making, entrepreneurial strategy, and social entrepreneurship.
Rob is a board member of the Interfaith Youth Core, a trustee of National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and a member of the Evaluation Advisory Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund.
Rob received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1981 and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1986.
Questions
Nora Patino, '06
President, Chicago Booth Alumni Club of Mexico