IEEE GOLD Webinar Series for 2009

Speaker: Arun Gopalakrishnan has worked for the DuPont Company as a Market Manager in Wilmington, Delaware since July 2006. Arun's first role at DuPont was providing marketing consulting to startup businesses within the company.  He moved to his current role in DuPont's Performance Elastomers division in August 2007, where he sets the global strategy and drives revenue growth in the Energy, Oil and Gas business segment.  His areas of specialty include innovation processes, business development, and pricing and profitability management.  

Arun began his career working for Motorola in Sydney, Australia as a research engineer, working on speech recognition and enhancement algorithms after finishing his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  He continued his education to receive an MBA in Marketing from Pennsylvania State University, USA.

The three webinars he will be presenting include:

• Seminar One: Navigating the business landscape . The recorded session is now available.
• Seminar Two: Creating new products  The recorded session is now available.
• Seminar Three: Career Change

Seminar 1: Navigating a globalized, turbulent business landscape – what engineers need to know (held on Saturday, 24 January 2009, 8:00am Eastern)

The recorded session is now available for viewing.

Globalization over the last 40 years has created a global economy where supply chains, technologies and markets interact across geographies like never before. This creates fresh challenges for firms that relied on stable customers and markets, long technology shelf life, long tenure employees, and the availability of technical talent in their home countries.

Engineers across the world can make a significant impact for the businesses they are part of, by understanding the key concepts driving business decisions in a globalized world, and challenging their business and commercial leaders to develop growth strategies that fit with the technological landscape of the 21^st century. Not doing so risks the very existence of a number of firms, which could face huge erosion in market share and value in the next ten years.

This seminar will cover concepts such as:

• Cost of Capital and how this drives business decision making
• New Product Portfolios – and how projects get selected and killed
• Global competition and shortening product life cycles
• Drivers of outsourcing in support services, manufacturing facilities and even Research and Development

Additionally, discussion on  tangible actions that engineers can take to increase their knowledge of business drivers, and challenge commercial managers to incorporate long-term strategies to ensure that their firm thrives for years to come.

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Seminar 2: How engineers and marketers work together to create new products in innovative companies (held on Saturday, 28 February 2009, 8:00am Eastern)

The recorded session is now available for viewing.

The best companies put their engineers and marketing people together, with disciplined processes to fully understand customer needs, and then develop solutions to meet those needs. This webinar would be about how the product development and commercialization process comes together from a cross-functional perspective.

The seminar will cover concepts such as:

• Best-in-class new product development processes
• Identifying true unmet customer needs with high value potential
• How to foster cross-functional collaboration between technical and marketing professionals
• Examples of successful product launches and critical success factors

Additionally, the seminar will also discuss tangible actions that engineers can take to ensure that their technical projects and efforts lead to high probability wins in the marketplace. 

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Seminar 3: Career change: how engineers can contribute in a business/commercial role for a technology company (Saturday, 4 April 2009, 8:00am Eastern)

People with engineering experience who also develop business skills can play key roles in technology companies where a combination of technical and commercial skills can be very effective. This is definitely a career path for engineers who would like to be on the commercial side of the organization. This webinar would be about how to make this transition, and the type of opportunities available for those who move from engineering to commercial roles.

Also planned for discussion include tangible actions that engineers can take to increase their differentiation and portability across industries, in today’s turbulent economic conditions.