The Ivy League institution, which has bet big on big data, will host an April conference with analytics leaders from American Apparel, and Comcast, among others.
The conference comes as business invests heavily in data analytics tools to help develop strategy and guide executive-level decision making.
A number of elite US business schools have sought to partner big data leaders. Cornell’s Johnson School of Management is working with LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Yahoo on data-focused MBA programs. MIT Sloan is in talks with Facebook and Amazon over big data placements for students of its new master’s in business analytics.
In Europe, HEC Paris, Warwick Business School, and Bologna Business School are among those to have teamed up with Silicon Valley groups including IBM and Google.
MBA students will need to understand how to use advanced analytical tools to make better decisions and to work with data scientists.
Companies including Bain & Company, and McKinsey & Co, the consultancy firms, have said they are looking for MBAs who can leverage data. Meanwhile, tech groups that use analytics to dominate their industries, have become among the top employers of business graduates, such as Apple and Google, whose CEOs are graduates of Duke Fuqua and Wharton.
McKinsey estimates 1.5 million more data managers and analysts will be required by 2018 in the US alone.
In previous years, the Wharton conference has drawn more than 250 industry practitioners from more than 60 organizations to hear detailed presentations about how companies are using analytics to better leverage their data.
“The detailed presentations, quality of speakers, and free-sharing of ideas makes this an extremely actionable event,” said Justin Cutroni, analytics evangelist at Google. “I walked away with a long list of contacts and topics to learn about.”
At the 2015 event, Dave Hastings, Netflix’s director of product analytics, spoke about how analytics helped the company decide which original series Netflix produced and which ones it didn’t. “We have had a whole catalogue of things we did not make,” he said. “We wanted early on to be careful, and it has worked out.”
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