Technical experts don’t just negotiate one-on-one. Engineering team members and leaders are required to deal with their own team, other stakeholders within their organizations and many external parties. This is true of academic lab settings, and also of commercial technology development environments and government projects. When the number of stakeholders increases, so do the complexities associated with communications, relationships, cultural differences and power dynamics. Effective professionals need to be able to map a multi-party situation and decide when and how to negotiate, facilitate, build winning coalitions, resolve conflicts and strive for consensus.
The course “ Multi-Stakeholder Negotiation for Technical Experts” is designed primarily for graduate students in engineering and joint engineering-business programs (such as SDM, IDM, and LGO) with no (or some) prior education or experience in the fields of negotiation, and is open (with instructor permission) to all graduate students. Students are provided with a repertoire of proven negotiation strategies, practice-based approaches, and analytical frameworks that enable them to develop their skills experientially and reflectively through simulations, role plays, case studies and video analysis. This graduate course is offered by the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program.

In 2020 Dinnar taught in the first-ever fully on-line format of the successful PON Global Online program, with a great group of participants from 30 countries!
PON Global is brought to you by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON), which has provided world-class negotiation training to more than 50,000 global professionals. Adapted for online delivery, PON Global — Online’s interactive format is designed to provide you with cutting-edge negotiation skills, teach you to overcome emotional and rational biases, and help you learn a range of cooperative and competitive negotiation strategies.
PON Global — Online will include 6 online live sessions, with additional asynchronous learning done between sessions. Live sessions with Dinnar will be 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm ET, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, March 8, 10, 12 and 15, 17, 19, 2021.

2020 was the year Mooly teamed up with Niraj Kumar of NegotiateUp to co-found and lead the first Online Negotiation Competition in July. The weekend event was a success with over 100 participants and a dozen professors. This motivated us to hold a second competition with even more participants from 40 countries in December. Mooly facilitated the finals stages, and also wrote the negotiation simulations that were used in the exciting live-broadcast negotiations. Mooly and other professors from top universities gave guest lectures to participants as part of these weekend “learning celebrations.” A third competition is scheduled for April 2021. Participation is affordable and all are welcome to participate. Dinnar will also lead a series of online workshops on NegotiateUp in February 2021.

Dinnar collaborated with faculty and staff in times of Covid-19 restrictions to develop and launch the inaugural fully online version of the successful Program on Negotiation offerings of the Harvard PON Global Online Program and the Negotiation Master Class Online, in November 2020. Each two-week workshop included 60 participants from over 30 countries. Dates for the 2021 sessions to be announced.

Especially around this year’s election season and pandemic challenges, we felt it was important to continue to help activists, students, community organizers, business people, educators, politicians, and concerned citizens to improve their skills and confidence in connecting to an audience while delivering their message. We adapted the weekend intensive workshop to a format of six evening online sessions, while maintaining the rigorous and intimate cohort experience.

With the help of wonderful faculty and industry advisors from the US and Europe, Dinnar facilitated another successful MIT Catalyst Entrepreneurship program in the spring of 2020, and helped launch the inaugural Catalyst Europe in the summer and fall of 2020. Good luck to the graduating fellows and projects, as they move to the Phase 2 implementation. We need innovation and entrepreneurship to increase the potential impact of biomedical research and we are already looking forward to the 2021 programs in the US and Europe!