Öykü Işık is Professor of Digital Strategy and Cybersecurity. She is an expert on digital resilience and the ways in which disruptive technologies challenge our society and organizations. Named as one of Switzerland's Digital Shapers in 2021 & 2023, and on the Thinkers50 Radar 2022 list of up-and-coming global thought leaders, she helps businesses to tackle cybersecurity, data privacy, and digital ethics challenges, and enables CEOs and other executives to understand these issues, which she believes are too important to be left to technical specialists alone.

Işık’s research explores ways in which emerging technologies can be exploited to foster responsible innovation. She has worked with organizations such as Mastercard, Ageas, KBC, BNP Paribas Fortis, Turkcell, and the European Union Intellectual Property Office to help them shape their responses to consumer concerns around cybersecurity, data privacy, and digital ethics.

While digital transformation creates more opportunities for organizations, this is also accompanied by increasing risks, she says. Cyber attackers are becoming more sophisticated and cyber extortion is now a booming business that poses a serious threat, with major financial, reputational, and regulatory implications for organizations that are targeted. Many organizations fail to give enough attention to these risks, but Işık is able to provide them with practical advice on how to develop the digital capabilities they need to ensure that they can deal with such hazards.

Meanwhile, growing consumer worries about data privacy and protection mean that organizations are under pressure to build digital trust and transparency, and new regulations such as the EU’s GDPR regime have major ramifications for the way that businesses process consumer data. Işık therefore helps them to understand customer concerns and regulatory changes, and to shape their privacy and data processing policies accordingly.

The emerging field of digital ethics is also growing in importance amid mounting anxieties over how organizations use digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, for surveillance. Ethical considerations therefore need to be addressed as such technologies are deployed, she says.

At IMD, she leads IMD’s Cybersecurity for Managers program, which helps businesses to develop an action plan to identify, prepare for, and respond to emerging and imminent cyber threats. She is also the program co-director for Generative AI Sprint program, which demystifies AI and generative AI and helps executives understand what kind of business challenges can be resolved using this new disruptive technology, as well as its shortcomings and risks.

A computer scientist by training, Isik is currently serving as a member of the Global Future Council on Cybersecurity for the World Economic Forum.  Her work before joining IMD in 2020 focused on business intelligence, analytics, and technology and business process management. She was previously Assistant Professor of Information Systems Management at Vlerick Business School in Belgium and taught information systems courses at the University of North Texas and Istanbul Bilgi University.