Innovation Leadership for Fashion and Luxury Consumer Brands

Duncan Simester investigates retail pricing and how customers form inferences about competitive prices from common marketing cues such as sale signs, price endings, installment billing offers, and credit card logos. Simester also investigates how operations research techniques can be used to optimize marketing decisions. His current work explores the long-term costs of stockouts, the long-term impact of promotion decisions, dynamic catalog mailing decisions, and adaptive techniques for the optimal design of pricing and product decisions. Other work investigates the allocation of ownership in channel relationships, and the adaptive design of market research instruments. His research is often inter-disciplinary in nature, using methodologies developed in economics or operations research to make contributions to the academic literature. The research relies heavily on industry participation, and includes many large-scale field tests conducted with a variety of direct marketing companies and other retail firms.

Francisco Javier López Navarrete is currently the founder and CEO of Mindway and Program Director. Since 2010, López Navarrete has directed ELLE’s Fashion and Luxury programs with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

He studied Public Affairs and has completed graduate studies in Marketing. López Navarrete is also among the youngest graduates of the Owner/President Management Program (OPM) at Harvard Business School.

López Navarrete, a luxury specialist and consultant, has taught strategy for the past 12 years across Spain, Latin America, and the US. He is the author of several books and articles on the fashion and luxury industry. His latest publication is on Fashion Branding.

Jake Cohen is Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Master’s Programs and a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Law at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He oversees MIT Sloan’s portfolio of degree programs, as well as the Offices of Admissions, Student Life, and Career Development. Jake is responsible for setting strategy for the undergraduate and all Master's programs, including the new Master of Business Analytics program. He teaches Financial Accounting to Master of Finance and Executive Education students, as well as Israel Lab, the newest addition to MIT Sloan’s portfolio of Action Learning programs. Jake is a member of the Dean’s Leadership Council, and MIT’s Title IX officer for MIT Sloan.

From 2008 to 2011, Jake was the Dean of the MBA Program at INSEAD, directing strategy and operations for campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. Under his leadership, INSEAD expanded its degree programs and received its highest rankings ever among business school MBA programs. Jake also served as a member of the Deans’ Leadership Team, overseeing every aspect of the academic experience in all programs. In 2012, he spent his post-deanship sabbatical teaching financial management as a Judge Fellow at Cambridge University and as a Research Fellow studying corporate social responsibility reporting at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Before becoming dean, Jake was director of the INSEAD-PricewaterhouseCoopers Research Initiative on High Performance Organizations. He was founder, director, and professor of INSEAD’s Business Foundations Program, as well as Affiliate Professor of Accounting and Control and Business Law. Before joining INSEAD in 2003, he was a Senior Teaching Fellow at Harvard Business School in the Accounting & Management Group.

Prior to his academic career, Jake worked as an accountant at KPMG LLP in Philadelphia, and as a mergers & acquisition consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in New York City. As an academic, he has consulted for a number of organizations including: BCG; Bain; Blackstone; ArcelorMittal; Schlumberger; Bel; Accenture, and BMO Capital.

Jake holds a JD in corporate law from Syracuse University, an MS in accounting from Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, and a BS in accounting from Lehigh University. He has completed six executive certificates at Harvard Business School; the AVIRA certificate for senior executives at INSEAD; and is currently participating in Leader to Leader (L2L), MIT’s nationally recognized best-practice leadership development program.

Mariano Hernández is Senior Business Development Manager at Apple Spain, participates as lecturer at the Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicaciones of Madrid, as well as at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and at the Instituto de Estudios Bursátiles where he teaches innovation.

Since 2000, his areas of interest have been the impact of technology on customer expectations and how it affects corporate strategies. He has done different studies on these areas and has recently published the book, Digital Transformation and Corporate Ecosystem.

Previously, he has held positions as Head of Business Development for Advanced Services for Sun Microsystems for southern Europe, as well as regional director for EDS / HP Services in Spain.

He holds a degree in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid, an MBA from the Organización Industrial de Madrid, PMI & ITIL Master certified by ISEB.