IAS Distinguished Lecture

Building Supply Chain Sustainability through Value Chain Innovations

Abstract

Increasingly, consumers and companies have heightened their awareness and concerns of the sustainability of the supply chains by which they sourced products and services. Supply chain sustainability encompasses environmental, social, and ethical responsibilities. To mitigate risks in these dimensions, leading companies have to come up with their best practices, and academics have also conducted research that quantified the risks and values of such practices, as well as explored new ways to build sustainability. In this talk, the speaker will highlight the recent developments on how companies have used the Sense and Respond framework to manage sustainability, where Sense aims at early detection of potential problems, and Respond involves mitigation strategies to incentivize improvements. He will then describe how, to complete the picture, we need innovations that would strengthen the communities and create more economic values of the economies where the suppliers are located. Ultimately, such innovations will form a sustainable way to build a sustainable supply chain.


About the speaker

Prof. Hau L. Lee obtained his PhD in Operations Research from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He has then taught at Stanford University and is currently the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Graduate School of Business. He is the founding and current Co-director of the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum. He was awarded a Doctor of Engineering honoris causa from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2006. In 2010, he was elected a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Prof. Lee is a towering academic in supply chain management, entrepreneurship and innovations in developing economies, and value chain strategy. He has published widely in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Supply Chain Management Review, IIE Transactions, and Interfaces, etc. He has served on the editorial boards of many international journals. From 1997-2003, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Management Science.

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