Turning Ocean Garbage Into Helpful Prosthetics, and More – Chicago News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Chicago business schools this week.
How “Speed Factories” Help Companies Adapt to Capricious Consumers – Kellogg Insight
In a new study co-authored by Northwestern Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics and Operations Jan Van Mieghem, Vlerick Business School’s Robert Boute, and Cardiff Business School’s Stephen Disney, the trio survey the return on investment for “speed factories” or local-market facilities “designed to quickly pump out products with shorter life cycles and less predictable demand.”
In the e-commerce age, speed factories are in high demand for manufacturers of realms of sneakers and sports apparel where they “offer fast turnaround to meet demand [for] custom-made products for very small local markets.”
Van Mieghem writes, “Amazon and fast-fashion trends mean that companies have had to increase their speed from product design to delivering that product to customers. If things must happen in days or weeks rather than months, you can’t be doing that from somewhere in Asia.”
The catch is that production costs are often extremely high. However, the trio found that speed factories are “worthwhile, despite their cost, and are best used as part of a portfolio of on and offshore production.”
Van Mieghem adds, “It’s about maintaining the flexibility to bring certain products in and move others out of a speed factory as needed.”
You can read more about the trio’s research here.
Anacortes Couple Turns Ocean Plastics into Prosthetics – K5 News
Gies College of Business Online MBA (iMBA) student and Anacortes, Washington resident Chris Moriarty and his wife Laura co-created the nonprofit Million Waves Project, which “takes littered plastics from the beaches for use in the creation of prosthetics.”
According to a recent profile on Seattle’s K5 News, “It takes just 15 plastic bottles, $45, and two-and-a-half days to make one hand. The couple uses open source software, a company that processes the plastic into filament and a 3-D printer.
In the K5 profile, Chris said, “We thought, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to take something deplorable in one sense and something heartbreaking in another, put them together and see what we could do.”
Laura adds, “It is daunting. Life is daunting. But like we tell our kids, that doesn’t mean you don’t move forward and try.”
Taking Stock of Market Uncertainty – Quinlan School of Business Stories
The Loyola University Quinlan School of Business blog recently profiled Assistant professor Hae mi Choi, Ph.D. about her research on how macroeconomics and market uncertainty influence financial analysts’ incentives over time.
Professor Choi explained that “financial analysts’ incentives and their forecasting performances are affected by market uncertainty, [which is] when investors have difficulty assessing the current and future market conditions because there is a lot of volatility within the market.”
Choi explains the value of her research to Quinlan students:
“If you want to be a good investor, you need to not only understand what’s going on within a firm, but also the macroeconomic conditions and the stock market conditions in general. Understanding how other investors in the stock market process information and how financial markets function is fundamental, as it impacts the wealth of us all.”
You can read the full interview here.
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
