News Roundup – USC Fintech, New Georgetown McDonough Fellowships, and More
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest stories from this week, including a USC Fintech profile, plus more.
Diving Into Disruption – USC Marshall News
What is the future of fintech? USC Marshall and the Institute for Outlier Research in Business (iORB) held a conference last month to address that very question.
Marshall faculty, Ph.D. candidates, and industry executives gathered to explore the challenges, trends, and research needs that are critical to the rapidly expanding universe of cryptocurrency. Corporate organizers included Lexant Advisors and Berkeley Research Group.
Issues such as strategy and risk management, AI and machine learning, and the necessary convergence of traditional banks and fintech were all addressed at the conference.
Marshall Professor Larry Harris says, “The research question is: Given the existence of these problems, how do we see the translation of the solution from a manual system to an electronic system?… Any one of the these problems could be the source of five different dissertations.”
You can learn more about USC fintech here.
Move Over, Managers: Are Robots on the Rise? – Fox School of Business News
Will the robots be your bosses?
Two Temple University Fox School of Business doctoral students are exploring this question through research on the effects of automation upon management roles. With their focus on services such as TaskRabbit, Xue Guo, and Zhi Cheng are studying how the new power of the service laborer is impacting managers and supervisors.
The gig economy, the team has revealed, enables workers to become more selective in the jobs that they pursue. Being one’s own boss is now more than ever a real possibility, and apps like TaskRabbit eliminate the need for a supervisor to connect for instance, a housecleaner to a client.
Guo says, “After the entry of TaskRabbit … we observed a 5.5 percent decrease in first-line managerial jobs.”
One downside of the shift in autonomy, however, is that it is limited to those laborers who are tech savvy. The barrier, however, is easily conquered by the availability of the technology and the willingness to learn, Guo notes.
Four Ways to Become a More Self-Aware Leader – Kellogg Insights
Karen Cates, Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, has recently proposed some important theories about how leaders can become more effective through some non-traditional methods.
Cates and her colleague, Clinical Professor of Leadership Brenda Ellington Booth are Executive Coaches. They have developed four strategies that bosses can practice to make them both more effective and more connected to their teams.
- Look beyond assessment tools (like Meyers Briggs tests and the like).
- Reflect upon what you can do better as a leader
- Don’t just change for the sake of changing
- Make self-reflection a daily habit
“Leadership isn’t just about taking assessments, attending seminars, or reading articles and filing them away in a folder on your desktop,” Cates says. “It has to be a living thing.”
New MBA Program Announces Fellowships in Entrepreneurship and Fintech – McDonough School of Business News
Georgetown McDonough has announced two new fellowships that will continue to push the school’s MBA grads to the top of their fields.
The school will welcome its first entrepreneurship fellowships this fall, and the inaugural recipient of the fintech fellowship will arrive in 2020.
“As Georgetown McDonough continues to attract more competitive candidates, we have been focused on launching new scholarships in specific interest areas, including entrepreneurship and fintech, and for those aligned with our commitment to social impact like AmeriCorps alumni,” says Shelly Heinrich, Associate Dean for MBA Admissions.
The fellows will participate in Georgetown Entrepreneurship, which shares knowledge on developments in business with the greater campus community; and the Center for Financial Markets and Policy which sponsors research and hosts events that address key financial market issues.
Harvard Talks Analytics, MIT Explores Diversity in Tech, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Should an Algorithm Tell You Who to Promote? – Harvard Business Review
Professor of human resource management Jeffrey T. Polzar published a fictionalized case study that illuminates the influential role that “people analytics” algorithms play in steering hiring managers to which hot new talent. In a recent interview with Harvard Business Review, Polzar said:
“The day after Anne’s farewell party, Aliyah met with Christine and Brad Bibson, a data scientist on the people analytics team. ‘We’ve just started looking at networks,” Brad said, ‘and we think they can reveal some useful information. These are network analyses based on Molly’s and Ed’s e-mail and meeting history at BBI. With their permission and without looking at the content of their e-mails or calendars, we analyzed who they had been in contact with across the firm over the past six months.'”
Explore more of the fictionalized case study here.
Diversity in Tech a “People Problem” In Need of a Management Solution – MIT Sloan Newsroom
The MIT Sloan Coders Club recently hosted the Black in Tech and Entrepreneurship panel, in which a group of five entrepreneurs and engineers “shared experiences and offered suggestions on what tech companies can do to diversify their workforces and diminish bias.” Adam Taylor, founder of news app Black, explains:
“It is a people problem. When you think about the people that are on your teams professionally, how would you hire someone to work with you every day for however long they’re with your company? You tend to hire people you’re comfortable with.”
Students Roderic Morris of Drift, Amal Hussein, Nana Essilfie-Conduah, and Adam Taylor / Photo via Mimi Phan
Read more about this diverse take on tech’s diversity issue here.
AI Knows What Customers Want, Transforms Supply Chains – D’Amore-McKim Blog
D’Amore-McKim’s distinguished professor of supply chain management Nada Sanders uses Spanish “fast fashion” company Zara as the shining example of an optimized supply chain that uses artificial intelligence to drive customer satisfaction. In fact, many other businesses have begun to crib notes.
“Seven-Eleven Japan has taken lessons from Zara, using technology to microsegment demand and to understand what customers want. They will literally reshuffle and change what the merchandising looks like in the course of one day, in one location, for different segments of customers.”
Read more about professor Sanders’ research here.
Babson Reveals New Scholarships, Rankings, for Blended Learning MBA – MetroMBA
MetroMBA recently spoke with F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business faculty director Phillip Kim about the shape of the Babson Blended Learning hybrid online MBA program, shortly after the school earned some high praise from the likes of the Financial Times.
“Our program integrates the best of the ‘full-time’ graduate experience with a delivery format designed for working professionals, whose time is at a premium. Our students can complete their MBA in 21 months while working full-time. They learn from accomplished faculty, who are experts in their own disciplines and translate academic concepts into practical takeaways for our students. We are also the number one school for entrepreneurship education, and this ethos is infused throughout the program.”
Read more of our interview with Kim here.
Stevens Alum Takes Disruptive FinTech Lessons Back Home to Brazil
ZeroBeta founder Rodrigo Silva Cosme, a MS ’16 Stevens Institute of Technology’s School of Business graduate, recently returned to his alma mater to present his master’s thesis, explaining how machine learning can apply to financial markets.
Cosme, who was invited by Professor Khaldoun Khashanah, explains; “The world is getting more automated, more efficient, more intelligent, and finance is no different. You need complete professionals who know how to code and also can handle the financial side of the business and implement solutions.” Cosme, who arrived in the United States with a “lifetime fascination with financial markets,” believes people who choose to trade by themselves can’t do it optimally.
Rodrigo Silva Cosme delivers his thesis at a recent Bloomberg conference at Stevens/Photo via Stevens.
The São Paulo-based ZeroBeta is a unicorn of sorts in the Brazilian market, which “lacks the liquidity that allows for more diversified risk in investment strategies.” The startup leverages algorithmic trading and portfolio optimization techniques to “build smarter strategies for trading.
Cosme continues, saying, “Instead of working for [hedge fund managers], we trade with them—we develop the strategies for the accounts, we make the trading decisions, and they do the commercial side of the business, getting customers and raising capital.”
Cosme attributes ZeroBeta’s success largely to the first-hand exposure he received at Stevens to the myriad ways that finance and technology can intersect. “What I do at my job, every day, is what I learned at Stevens — from trading option spreads, to coding through C++ design patterns, to portfolio rebalancing. If you’re not able to find the answers with the kind of resources Stevens has, you can’t find them anywhere.”
Stevens Institute Internet of Things Journal Leads Pack on Research
When discussing the Internet of Things—the principle concept of mass interconnected smart devices—the possibilities, according to the Stevens Institute of Technology, seem relatively infinite.
Stevens Prof Uses Big Data To Transcribe Ancient History
Stevens Institute of Technology recently revealed details about innovative new research being conducted by CS professor and machine learning expert Fernando Perez-Cruz that would analyze and digitize 88 million pages of ancient handwritten documents that might provide insights into questions about “European history, the Conquistadors, New World contact and colonialism, law, politics, social mores, economics and ancestry.”
MIT Sloan CIO Conference Addresses Future of Work
MIT Sloan recently discussed last month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which addressed strategies to mitigate the digital transformation that AI, machine learning, self-driving cars, and the Internet of Things are expected to have on the future of work. TL;DR: everybody needs to step up their game.
