Philly News: UD Promotes Gender Equity and More
Let’s visit some of the biggest news coming out of Philadelphia business schools this week.
LeBow Students Help Dow Chemical Use Customer Feedback—Technical.ly Philly
Teams of students and faculty at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business are on a mission to help companies utilize massive amounts of untapped data. Recently, LeBow students have been helping university partner Dow Chemical in a quest to glean insight into consumers’ responses to products.
According to the project’s supervisor, Professor of MiS Murugan Anandarajan, “Our students not only extract, clean and explore data—they also derive valuable insights that can be used to make decisions. Students transform data points to convey potential strategies that companies should implement.”
Using online reviews of Dow products, students created an interactive dashboard to map out patterns in reviews. With an accessible map of this data, the company can easily use trends in consumer feedback to improve its products and marketing.
Read more about LeBow’s work with Dow Chemical here.
Lerner College to Host Women’s Leadership Initiative Launch—Delaware Business Now
The World Economic Forum predicts that it will take 158 years to reach true gender equality in North America alone. Luckily, schools like University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics are committed to promoting gender equity now. In fact, this International Women’s Day, Lerner is hosting the Women’s Leadership Initiative Launch at the Roselle Center for the Arts.
According to UD’s website, the Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI), “… is the preeminent driver of learning to propel transformational women leaders and advance gender equity in the workplace.”
The free event at the Roselle Center will feature prominent alumni speakers like Terri Kelly, president and CEO of W.L. Gore and Associates, Inc., Mary Ellen Payne, former VP of sales and marketing at Verizon Communications, and several others.
Read more about the Women’s Leadership Initiative Launch here.
Wharton Professor Claims Brainstorming Meetings Stifle Creativity—CNBC
In a recent interview with Amazon, Adam Grant, famed author and professor at The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, detailed the flaws with using brainstorming meetings to find creative solutions. According to Grant, bringing colleagues together to think out loud is a surefire way to limit the scope of their ideas. Shyer or less assertive members of the team may go unheard, fear of embarrassment may make others “play it safe” by expressing only their most conventional ideas, or the members of the group may fall into convergent thinking, wherein the majority of people support one idea and less popular suggestions fizzle out.
Grant promotes having everyone write out their ideas before sharing them. In fact, Grant says that the way to reach maximum creativity is to write out 200 ideas. Grant, organizational psychologist, has authored several books and was recently named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list.
Read more about Adam Grants views of creativity in business here, and check out the Amazon video below.
