MIT-ANPEIBRAZIL SUMMIT 2026

About the speaker

Ben Armstrong

Executive Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center

Co-Lead, Work of the Future Initiative

Ben Armstrong is the executive director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, where he co-leads the Work of the Future initiative. His research examines how manufacturers compete in the U.S. and around the world. He is particularly interested in the role of automation technologies, skilled workers, and supplier-buyer relations in shaping industrial productivity. He co-leads the research program at MIT’s Initiative for New Manufacturing and serves on the executive committee of HAND, a NSF Engineering Research Center focused on dexterous robotics. Ben’s work has been published or featured in academic and popular outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. He received his PhD from MIT and formerly worked at Google Inc.

About the speaker

David Robertson

Senior Lecturer, Operations Management

MIT Sloan School of Management

David Robertson is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches Product Development and Digital Product Management. Prior to MIT, Robertson was a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and from 2002 through 2010 was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. Robertson has also held several executive management positions in enterprise software companies, and spent five years at McKinsey & Company in the U.S. and Sweden. Robertson has a PhD and MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a BS from the University of Illinois.

About the speaker

Shari Loessberg

Senior Lecturer, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management

MIT Sloan School of Management

Shari Loessberg is a Senior Lecturer in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is an experienced entrepreneur and investor in established and emerging markets. She has particular experience in emerging market venture capital fund formation, entrepreneurship in emerging economies, and the evolving issues and standards of corporate governance in the United States and abroad. She has served on and led a number of public, private and non-profit boards, and is active in a number of educational programs on board education globally.

At MIT, Shari Loessberg focuses on entrepreneurial ecosystem acceleration as a faculty member of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, with a primary interest around increasing access to capital. She is also a faculty director of the MIT Sloan Women on Boards program, focused on increasing women serving and succeeding on major corporate boards in Latin America. Her teaching focuses on increasing student engagement with and learning from emerging and frontier market startups, scaleups, and ecosystems globally, as well as engaging science and engineering students with venture capital and other funding sources in entrepreneurship.