As far back as 2007, David Schmittllein, Dean of MIT Sloan School, saw the need to develop an alumni board, but it took several years for him to organize alumni across the world. Chair of the Alumni Board of the Digital Economy Initiative at MIT, Aliza Blachman O’Keeffe, joined Dave Vellante for a chat on theCUBE. She was part of the MIT IDE 2015 Conference in London, England earlier this week and sat down to explain more about the Alumni Board and the Digital Economy Initiative. The Initiative was launched due to the realization that there were, initially, no alumni for the MIT Sloan School.  “The purpose of the Board is to help the school create the strongest and most cohesive community that we can,” O’Keeffe said. That community has a cohort of thirty persons representing alumni from different courses and graduation years.

The alumni are really proud to have called MIT Sloan their school and the Board aims to act as a conduit between the current students and faculty, and the alumni across the world. O’Keeffe pointed out that her roles include engaging alumni by getting them to attend events, network with each other, have an up-to-date understanding of what is happening in the school, and also providing information to alumni who might be interested in continuing education at MIT.

O’Keeffe made a very strong point on the philanthropic element of alumni engagement. She noted that, “If you don’t have engagement and a sense of connection…you won’t want to support it philanthropically and the school can’t do that without your support.”

The scope of the initiative is far reaching and global. Just last year, MIT had a similar conference in Sao Paolo. This speaks to the impact MIT has on the world. Being based in the U.K., the question was: how does the Chair “foster that kind of engagement with such a distributed global organization,” according to O’Keeffe. In response, she pointed out that it is indeed a tough task, even though it’s easier in metropolitan areas, where there are clubs or a large group of alumni in one location. However, they use different strategies, including online opportunities, to reach and effectively engage the alumni in the rural areas.

There is a digital innovation initiative being explored as innovation centers are being set up across the world. Executives are being trained in these centers and the Alumni Board is partly responsible for this initiative. MIT Sloan School has always been internationally-focused, especially in terms of the dimensions of management and economics, so it has been “natural” for the school to engage people (online and offline) from across the world.

MIT boasts that more than 50 percent of their alumni have started their own company and that is very impressive for any school. Even if the companies were not solely digitally focused; they had something to do with the digital field. This is not surprising since MIT Sloan has at its core, the drive towards entrepreneurship.

The next conference for MIT IDE is set for South America next year, where the drive towards innovation and entrepreneurship through digital initiatives will continue.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of MIT IDE 2015.